Faculty Directory

Summary of Expertise

I am interested in understanding the causes and consequences of social information for species interactions from the perspectives of behavioral and community ecology.  Social information that is transmitted within and among species  typically concerns predation risk.  What are the roles of different species in providing information about predation risk to the community? What is the relative importance of different types of information to the larger community?  How do species roles and different types of information change in their importance across environmental gradients? How does evolutionary history affect the production and use of different types of information? What are the consequences in shifts in the social information landscape for top down community processes? Our lab has a number of projects oriented towards answering these questions. We combine natural history with both field experiments and observations and phylogenetic tools to address these questions.

Research Interests

We currently have research projects on the following topics:

Heterospecific eavesdropping and its consequences for community-wide communication networks

Changes in social information use across urban-rural gradient

Evaluating the roles of biotic processes in determining community stability in the tropics

Dietary niche overlap in neotropical birds

The role of social information in influencing habitat use, and top-down control in neotropical forests

Biography, Education and Training

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Teaching Interests

I am currently teaching Behavioral Ecology.

I have previously taught Ornithology and Tropical Biology.