General Research Interests:
I am interested in the ecology and evolution of animal behaviour with a specific focus on social behaviour. I am particularly interested in the links between social behaviour, movement ecology, and space use and how these behaviours relate to one another within the context of disease ecology. We test our hypotheses in three primary systems: Caribou in Newfoundland, Caribou in Ontario, and bats in Ontario (on Manitoulin Island and southwestern Ontario).
1. Integrating animal social and spatial behaviour: Individuals that are connected in their social network are also connected spatially in the sense that they must share space to interact with one another. Investigation into the relationship between social and spatial behaviour is relatively novel and I am broadly interested in the empirical, conceptual, and methodological synthesis of social and spatial behaviour.
2. Caribou conservation and management: caribou populations are in decline throughout Canada and our lab is interested in studying the causes of decline in Ontario and Newfoundland and focusing on possible adaptive management strategies to improve population trends going forward. Much of this work is new for our group and as more projects become established, we will update this section!
3. Dietary and resource specialization and foraging ecology: Individual animals are predicted to vary in the extent to which they specialize or generalize in their diets and the resources they use. The degree to which individuals vary in their resource use falls along a generalist-specialist continuum. Individuals vary in their resource use to reduce intraspecific competition through specializing on a subset of the resources available to the population. For example, the niche variation hypothesis predicts that individuals should become resource specialists when population density is high to reduce competition. Our research group is focused on assessing how dietary and resource specialization varies as a function of the availability of food or resources, across population density gradients, and how specialization affects fitness.
4. The social environment and pathogen dynamics. Among the most important costs of social behaviour is an increased risk of transmitting parasites and pathogens. In theory, animals living at higher population densities or in larger social groups tend to face greater risk of acquiring and transmitting pathogens. My ongoing work in this area is to develop research questions using free-ranging animals and test hypotheses grounded in behavioural and ecological theory that are relevant for transmission dynamics.
I am interested in the ecology and evolution of animal behaviour with a specific focus on social behaviour. I am particularly interested in the links between social behaviour, movement ecology, and space use and how these behaviours relate to one another within the context of disease ecology. We test our hypotheses in three primary systems: Caribou in Newfoundland, Caribou in Ontario, and bats in Ontario (on Manitoulin Island and southwestern Ontario).
1. Integrating animal social and spatial behaviour: Individuals that are connected in their social network are also connected spatially in the sense that they must share space to interact with one another. Investigation into the relationship between social and spatial behaviour is relatively novel and I am broadly interested in the empirical, conceptual, and methodological synthesis of social and spatial behaviour.
2. Caribou conservation and management: caribou populations are in decline throughout Canada and our lab is interested in studying the causes of decline in Ontario and Newfoundland and focusing on possible adaptive management strategies to improve population trends going forward. Much of this work is new for our group and as more projects become established, we will update this section!
3. Dietary and resource specialization and foraging ecology: Individual animals are predicted to vary in the extent to which they specialize or generalize in their diets and the resources they use. The degree to which individuals vary in their resource use falls along a generalist-specialist continuum. Individuals vary in their resource use to reduce intraspecific competition through specializing on a subset of the resources available to the population. For example, the niche variation hypothesis predicts that individuals should become resource specialists when population density is high to reduce competition. Our research group is focused on assessing how dietary and resource specialization varies as a function of the availability of food or resources, across population density gradients, and how specialization affects fitness.
4. The social environment and pathogen dynamics. Among the most important costs of social behaviour is an increased risk of transmitting parasites and pathogens. In theory, animals living at higher population densities or in larger social groups tend to face greater risk of acquiring and transmitting pathogens. My ongoing work in this area is to develop research questions using free-ranging animals and test hypotheses grounded in behavioural and ecological theory that are relevant for transmission dynamics.