I am trained as a community ecologist, and my students and I continue to do research in this area.  Most of my publications are available as pdfs.  Most recently, we have been working in the general area of phylogenetic community ecology, or historical ecology.  The general modus operandi for this research program is to target a group of organisms, reconstruct a phylogeny for that group, and ask an ecological question.  For example, Katy Frederick (M.S. graduate in 2006; presently as Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri-Columbia) asked how katydid (Orthoptera: Tettigoniidae) species richness and diversity varied among three different habitat types in Northeast Missouri: prairie remnants, old fields, and pastures.  This pattern is fairly straightforward to document.  But she also reconstructed the phylogeny of the regional pool of katydids and asked the following question: Do katydid communities from a given habitat type represent a random draw from the regional phylogeny?  By asking this question – and linking the ecological question (patterns of species richness) to the history (phylogeny) of the group – she provided the practical and theoretical connection between evolution and ecology.  Instead of focusing on the uniqueness (or not) of katydid communities between the habitats in a proximate context (a history-free approach), she tried to understand if an assemblage of katydid species in a particular habitat represented a unique assemblage (e.g., occurs only from a particular clade) in a phylogenetic context.

My lab group continued this line of research in the context of Truman's Mathematical Biology Initiative.  I worked with a statistician (Prof. Dean DeCock) and three students to develop statistics that incorporate abundance into tests of phylogenetic clustering and overdispersion.  Two manuscripts are ready to be submitted for these projects.

Finally, another one of my students also did research on katydid diversity in Belize, Central America.  Her name is Robbie Rader and she is a naturalist at the Missouri Department of Conservation.  Her katydid specimens have already established four range expansions and will probably yield new species to science.  When I returned her ~150 katydid specimens to the Belize National Insect Collection in November 2007, her specimens quadrupled the number of specimens already in the collection!

Please contact me if you are interested in my research or are a prospective student.  For an overview of my students and what they have done, you can open this pdf.