Research highlights

I am interested in the ecological dynamics that promote species coexistence, particularly within forest ecosystems. My work centers around understanding how disturbance and succession enable different species with varying life history strategies to coexist. I tend to work with partial differential equations and dynamical systems to study various phenomena. Ideally, we can also real-world forest data to test and refine these models. My motivation lies in deepening ecological theory and studying interesting systems through rigorous mathematical models and numerical experiments, leveraging tools from differential equations and scientific computing to analyze complex ecological processes. I work under the supervision of Dr. Annette Ostling (you can visit her lab website here).

Current Projects

Life History Strategies in a Structured Metapopulation

Abstract: A mechanistic understanding of species coexistence remains a significant challenge in ecological theory. Classical forest ecology hypotheses suggest that disturbances and patch dynamics enable coexistence among species with various life history strategies, termed “successional niche” differentiation. However, prior mathematical models have not fully delineated how variations in life history strategies can promote coexistence under disturbance and succession. We extend a PDE model that includes explicit patch aging, disturbances, and within-patch competition, by incorporating the age of reproductive maturity as a key trait. We find several trade-offs involving traits associated with reproduction and mortality. We also find species abundance patterns that differentiate these mechanisms from classical succession. We use ForestGEO plot data from BCI to look for empirical evidence of these trade-offs.

Poster PDF Here. (Poster Presentation at STRI’s BCI 100 Year Symposium in May 2024 and Mathematical Models in Ecology and Evolution in June 2024)

A Framework for Stochastic, Size-structured Neutral Model for Community Assemby

Abstract: Neutral Biodiversity Theory (NBT) describes communities where competitors coexist due to their similar performance in the environment, in which case stochastic birth, death, and dispersal events are the predominant influence on community-level characteristics. Deviations in observations of these characteristics from NBT’s predictions could indicate when mechanisms other than chance are important, such as classical niche differences instead enabling a stable coexistence of competiting species. The original NBT ignored potential variation within species in birth and death rates. More recently, a size-structured NBT was developed to improve NBT by considering size-based variation in demographic rates. However, this sizestructured NBT approximated speciation to be like immigration and ignored size variation in birth rates. In this work, we are improving upon this prior work to develop an accurate and complete size-structured NBT. We have derived an equation for the generating function of our improved size-structured NBT and found its solution. Work in progress is to use it to derive the Species Abundance Distribution (SAD) and Species Biomass Distribution (SBD), i.e. the distributions describing how many rare vs common species there are when abundance is measured on the basis of the number of individuals and total biomass across individuals respectively

Poster PDF Here. Poster PDF: (Poster Presentation at the 8th meeting of the International Conference on Analysis of Biological Systems in October 2022)