Latest news: Check out our new paper in Nature Communications analyzing community dynamics in response to warming in 7,123 freshwater and 6,201 terrestrial communities

Welcome! I’m an ecologist, global change biologist and group leader based in London

This site outlines my research in global community ecology, which asks:

How do climate, dispersal and other processes acting across the planet create and erase patterns of species, functional, phylogenetic and interaction diversity?

To answer this question I integrate and collect data on plants and animals, in isolation or via their interactions, and develop modeling and theoretical tools.

My goal is to better link global change, in particular climate change, with community ecology and biogeography. Making these links can improve predictions of, map threats to, and aid the recovery of biodiversity dynamics.

My research, teaching and outreach are currently focused on:

  • Building a global ecology of species interactions, with a focus on the biogeography of seed dispersal, a key trophic interaction

  • Protecting ecosystems with ecological theory and big data, in particular across the terrestrial, freshwater and marine realms

  • Untangling biodiversity dynamics across scales, especially the effects of climate, dispersal and biogeographic history on diversity patterns

I have worked in Amsterdam, Zürich, California, the Amazon and Borneo:

As a postdoc at UvA and the ETH Domain (WSL, ETH Zürich), I synthesized global data to study and conserve terrestrial, freshwater and marine diversity.

During my PhD at UCLA I used spatial models and traits to separate the effects of processes on spatial patterns in Amazonian trees and the New World flora.

Before graduate school I was a research assistant in tropical ecology at Berkeley, an independent researcher in Borneo with funding from Harvard and studied visual and fine arts at the San Francisco School of the Arts.

Have a look around! I hope this site can spark discussions with folks interested in ecology, global change, open science, inclusive teaching, science communication, travel and photography