SCHOLARS@TAMU

I study community and ecosystem resilience in coastal oceans and estuaries.My lab works to uncover key processes and interactions that maintain biodiversity and the function of coastal marine ecosystems in the face of multiple stressors. These include increasing climate variability, extreme events, reductions in important species like predators and habitat-formers, and species invasions. Our focus on extreme event ecology includes effects of major storms, heat waves, low-oxygen events, harmful algal blooms, and diseases. We use field and lab experiments, environmental and biodiversity monitoring, data synthesis and theory to investigate these processes in a variety of marine ecosystems, urban and remote, intertidal and subtidal, temperate and tropical. We also help build the science needed to support sustainable invertebrate fisheries. We're especially interested in helping small-scale and traditional fisheries weather the increasing uncertainty of global change.