My Interests
Climate Research
Modeling temperature dynamics in talus slopes and pika habitats at different scales (regional, local, microclimate)
Population Ecology
Understanding pika distribution patterns driven by climate variability and disease dynamics
Science Outreach
Bridging research and community through native gardens, restoration projects, and public engagement
Field Work
Guiding Principles
"It may well be that natural systems are not so very fragile; they are, after all, complex adaptive systems that will probably change and become new systems in the face of environmental stresses. What is fragile, however, is the maintenance of the services on which humans depend. There is no reason to expect systems to be robust in protecting those services—recall that they permit our survival but do not exist by virtue of permitting it, and so we need to ask how fragile nature's services are, not just how fragile nature is."
"It is therefore important to identify criteria thresholds in which slight changes in landscape patterns produce sudden changes in the response of the process... the extrapolation of information across a critical threshold requires information on the behavior of the system on both sides of the threshold."
"Variation in land uses outside of habitat can alter both survival and reproduction, leading to changes in the intrinsic rate of increase and expectations for total suitability."