I have long been fascinated by aquatic ecosystems, and I
started my education as an undergraduate student of biological sciences at
Clemson University in South Carolina (where I grew up). After finishing my BS in biological sciences,
I entered the MS program in aquaculture, fisheries and wildlife at Clemson
where my research focused on the life history and ecology of the yellowfin shiner (Notropis lutipinnis). After completing my MS, I entered the PhD
program in natural resources at Cornell University where my work focused on
studies of relationships between stream communities and human land uses. Since completing my PhD, my expertise has
broadened to include studies of fish, aquatic insects, unionoid clams, and
zooplankton in large rivers, inland lakes, and Great Lakes nearshore
areas. This expertise is strongly
founded on field-based experiments, observations, and surveys to collect data
that support my efforts to explore site- and habitat-specific community
relationships. I have also used these
data to explore relationships between aquatic communities and multi-scale
environmental data using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software. My objectives in conducting these studies
are to provide greater insight into the ecological mechanisms that support
and sustain native biodiversity and to more explicitly identify threats to
ecological functions, species persistence, and community stability over
multiple spatial scales.
I have particular interest in using a combination of
manipulative field ecological studies and GIS spatial analyses to observe and
model responses of aquatic communities to patterns and changes in watershed
(streams, rivers, and inland lakes) and shoreline (large rivers, and Great
Lakes nearshore areas) environmental properties over multiple spatial
scales. I am also very interested in
the integration of temporal factors into spatially explicit models given the
importance of temporally driven events (e.g., migration, reproduction,
dispersal, etc.) for determining community structure. Such temporal effects are generally not
considered in this type of modeling despite seasonal shifts in community
composition and highly variable, temporally inconsistent data resulting from
“snapshot” approaches to sampling. I
believe that the inclusion of temporal phenomena in such modeling efforts
would enrich our understanding of aquatic community patterns and responses to
perturbation (natural and anthropogenic) within multi-scale contexts of
landscapes. Such understanding can
better inform conservation and planning strategies aimed at enhancing the
long-term viability of aquatic biodiversity within existing fragmented
landscapes and landscapes that are subject to significant development
pressures now and in the future.
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