Dept. of Life & Environmental Sciences
School of Natural Sciences
University of California Merced
Outside the Convex Hull
W e are a diverse group of ecologists and evolutionary biologists who investigate how individuals, populations, and communities function using a combination of theory, statistical approaches, and sometimes even data. The questions that we investigate range from understanding how food webs are structured and function over large temporal and spatial scales, to what rodents eat and why, to uncovering energetic thresholds constraining mammalian body size evolution, to predicting when crickets should lose their chirp, to exploring the effects of assembly and ecological engineers on evolving communities, to predicting behavioral transitions among mammalian carnivores. While our interests are varied, we aim to apply simple models in mature ways to uncover the fundamental processes governing the dynamics of eco-evolutionary systems over contemporary and paleontological timescales.
\(\oint\) News & Updates
- 04/01/26: New Paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society! Led by recent PhD student Irina Birskis-Barros, this very cool paper explores the role of individual variation in beak morphology and diets of Hawaiian honeycreepers prior to the extinction of many species in the early part of the 20th century. Because we know which species went extinct and when, we begin to piece together whether individual variation may have buffered species against extinction. Morphological variability as a buffer against extinction: insights from Hawaiian honeycreepers
- 02/01/26: New paper in PNAS! What can we learn about a network from individual motifs? Sometimes quite a lot… this paper, led by Melanie Habermann and with Ashkaan Fahimipour and Thilo Gross explores cases where specific species interaction motifs drive the dynamics of food webs, and examines the notion of reactivity as an important dynamical feature of complex systems. Functional motifs in food webs and networks
- 11/20/25: New Paper in Oikos! How stable is an ecosystem when you strip population dynamics down to their simplest form? We model species as either high or low in abundance—revealing how food web structure drives stability, extinction risk, and trophic cascades. This is a weird way to view population dynamics, but the exercise highlights some important but neglected concepts in food web theory, such as the role of trophic short-circuits, where very high trophic species feed on very low trophic species. Distilling the dynamics of food webs