My research focuses on how disturbance and dispersal processes shape local population, community, and metacommunity patterns in streams. I’m most interested in how life-history traits of aquatic organisms (e.g. dispersal modes) interact with stream flow variability to produce the highly-diverse communities that often we find in streams. Understanding these interactions is critical in the face of altered flow regimes resulting from climate change and anthropogenic water withdrawals. While much of my work focuses on drought and arid-land stream invertebrate communities, I study a number of different systems (e.g. subalpine and coastal streams), taxa (e.g. fish and amphibians), and types of physical and biotic disturbance (e.g. wildfires, floods, invasive species). I also love good old-fashioned biodiversity surveys, especially in places which are little-visited and highly vulnerable to anthropogenic disturbances.
