The Anthropocene is rearranging many biological communities, due to novel species interactions, climate change, or land-use change. This represents an opportunity and a necessity to understand how communities might respond in a changing world. In particular, I am interested in how anthropogenic change might apply an environmental filter on communities and understanding in which underlying environmental contexts certain traits are filtered for or against. 

 

To this end, I have studied how climate change impacts activity periods of alpine amphibians (Lertzman-Lepofsky et al. 2020), how anole communities reassemble after deforestation along an elevation gradient (Lertzman-Lepofsky et al., in review), and if Indigenous mariculture practices select for larger and more long-lived clams (Toniello et al. 2019)

As with many in EEB, I spend a lot of my time on my computer wrangling scripts in R to glean insights about my data and my study systems.  I am an enthusiastic R user and have experience with functional programming, phylogenetic comparative methods, multivariate statistics, and hierarchical models in both Frequentist and Bayesian frameworks. 

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I am also passionate about teaching R and making it more accessible both through undergraduate mentorship, courses, and workshops. To this end, I have mentored 13 undergraduate students and have designed and led workshops in the basics of functional programming in R.

I am interested in the relationships between ecology and evolution and whether we can detect the signature of these different processes at varying spatial scales. 

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During my PhD, I test these ideas among the Anolis lizards. Through extensive community-level mark-resample surveys, I connect local processes and abundance to evolutionary history both within and between islands of the Greater Antilles (Frishkoff et al. 2022).  Click here for more information on my adventures in the field and here for some drone videos by post doc Dan Nicholson. 

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This work is done in collaboration between the Mahler lab at University of Toronto and the Frishkoff lab at University Texas, Arlington.

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