Community ecology across scales
I am interested in what shapes patterns of community structure and how these mechanisms shift along elevation gradients, across regions with distinct evolutionary history, and across the globe.
During my PhD (University of Toronto 2026), I studied what shapes community structure among Anolis lizards. I asked what drives patterns of trait space occupation across islands and elevation gradients and tested how these relationships are impacted by evolutionary history (Frishkoff et al. 2022).
This work was done in collaboration between the Mahler lab at University of Toronto and the Frishkoff lab at University Texas, Arlington.
I have also used the BioTime dataset to explore whether communities show correlated changes in abundance through time (Lertzman-Lepofsky et al. 2024).
Change in the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene is rearranging many biological communities, due to novel species interactions, climate change, or land-use change. I am interested in how these changes might apply an filter to reshape the structure of local communities.
For my post-doc, working with Mark Vellend at the University of Sherbrooke and the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, I am extending the idea of adaptive community dynamics to test whether community temporal turnover leads changes in community function and productivity.
I have also studied how Anolis communities reassemble after deforestation along an elevation gradient (Lertzman-Lepofsky et al. 2026), how climate change impacts the activity period of alpine amphibians (Lertzman-Lepofsky et al. 2020), and if Indigenous mariculture practices select for larger and more long-lived clams (Toniello et al. 2019).
