My main interest is in the distribution and abundance of species over space and time because it is at the heart of the species-environment relationship and thus ecology and it is vital to conservation biology and planning. Understanding species distributions in a causal manner is vital for threatened species management, climate change planning and protected area design. My research combines high-level ecological theory and spatial analysis to address fundamental questions in ecology and to improve tools for applied ecology and conservation biology.
Within the field of species distribution modeling I work on topics such as statistics (especially machine learning techniques), data assembly and management (ecological data sets and remote sensing data), effects of climate and land-use change on species distributions, and spatial patterns and mechanisms underlying species distributions. Population dynamics and dispersal play a prominent role in my investigations of mechanisms underlying distributions. I also use insights and approaches from community ecology to improve the understanding of distributions.
My lab’s research spans from local field experiments to the largest spatial and temporal scales possible (world-wide and hundred thousands of years). Students in my lab and I have worked on plants (e.g. the invasive grass Microstegium vimineum and tree distributions), insects (e.g. ants), birds (hundreds of species in databases, Marbled Murrelets and Pileated Woodpeckers in the field) and fish (Ohio and world-wide data). However, I’m open to work on any organism that promises to advance our insights in ecology and conservation. We often use advanced data management and analysis techniques implemented in R in our research and use advanced technology in the field.