I am a postdoctoral associate in Environmental Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In collaboration with my postdoc advisor, Chris Wilmers, I study the effects of climate change on grazer dominated food webs in Yellowstone National Park.
I completed my PhD at the Center for Population Biology, University of California at Davis with Donald Strong.
Understanding how climate change will impact terrestrial food webs requires an understanding of how landscape context influences climate driven seasonal patterns of plant phenology, herbivore movement, and higher trophic level interactions.
In this effort, I am collaborating with Chris Wilmers, Mark Hebblewhite, and Taal Levi to model climate impacts on the gray wolf food web in two Rocky mountain sites.
In California's coastal prairie, a microparasitic entomopathogenic nematode Heterohabditis marelatus is the natural enemy of the ghost moth (Hepialus californicus) larvae which are root feeding herbivores of the bush lupine (Lupinus arboreus). By suppressing ghost moths, entomopathogenic nematodes protect lupines and increase seed set, growth and survivorship. In their absence, ghost moths can decimate large stands of lupines and can potentially alter the composition of the plant community. For my dissertation, I studied the spatial and temporal dynamics of this microparasite.