I study the structure and dynamics of complex networks of species interactions. My research focuses on how different types of interactions – with consumers, resources, and mutualists – interface to affect ecological systems across scales, from the behaviour of organisms to emergent ecosystem functions across landscapes.

In collaboration with the Centre for Ecosystem Management and management agencies across the Great Lakes Basin (GLB), I used ecological theory to develop qualitative guidance for promoting ecosystem resilience by targeting current management actions in space, time, and through ecological networks. Preserving and restoring biodiversity, natural disturbance regimes, and habitat heterogeneity, strategically designed at landscape scales, support dynamic processes like portfolio effects and adaptive capacity that generate and maintain ecosystem-scale resilience. My work focuses on how freshwater fisheries and regenerative agriculture practices can restore such processes in local systems, with landscape-scale consequences.

Terrestrial food webs include a diverse set of consumer-resource interactions, from specialized herbivores with strategies ranging from galling to grazing, to plant-animal mutualisms that support an immense amount of production in natural and managed (agricultural) ecosystems. My work has documented the enormous diversity of species and interactions in a terrestrial forest food web, shown consistent patterns in the population dynamics that emerge from two-species mutualisms, and demonstrated their ability to enhance stability, standing biomass, and productivity in simulated food webs. My current work is focused on how species’ traits can predict these diverse interactions, and how the range of life history strategies in terrestrial plants, and the dynamics of their growth patterns, support biodiversity in ecosystems from the ground up.

Organisms exhibit remarkable diversity in their biology, but simple rules can explain much of this variation. Metabolic and other bioenergetic rates scale allometrically (with body mass) to ~ the ¾ power, an observation which has been used to successfully predict species interactions in some contexts. Yet, another rule of life is variation: organisms systematically deviate from allometric scaling representing a fast or slow pace of life relative to their body size. Among consumers, bioenergetically ‘fast’ organisms tend to engage in riskier and more aggressive behaviors to accommodate their greater energy requirements, while ‘slow’ organisms exhibit behaviors that reduce activity. Similarly, among producers, fast-growing organisms tend to be smaller, more nutrient-rich, and more tolerant to consumption, while slow-growing organisms tend to be larger, more carbon-rich, and more resistant to consumption (e.g., through woody or chemical defenses). I am currently working on a series of projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop rules for how this fast-slow variation in bioenergetic traits from the scale of phenotypes to whole ecosystem-composition affects consumer-resource dynamics and emergent ecological functions. This work will provide fundamental insight into how variation propagates through biological scales, and potentially improve the predictive capacity of current bioenergetic models for applications to natural and managed systems.

Coastal marine systems are ecologically interesting because local and regional processes can become decoupled, providing insight into their relative roles. Regional tides and upwelling events sweep in and out nutrients, resources, and organisms, which can be consumed (but rarely depleted) or settle and establish depending on local abiotic and biotic interactions, such as the availability of substrate given the interplay of mixing, spatial competition, and habitat facilitation. In collaboration with researchers and students working along the Californian, Chilean, and South African coasts, we are building ecological networks of interconnected trophic and non-trophic interactions to study the structure and dynamics upwelling systems globally.