Publications

Invasive plant species have substantial negative ecological and economic impacts. Geographic information on the potential and actual distributions of invasive plants is critical for their effective management. For many regions, numerous sources of predictive geographic information exist for invasive plants, often in the form of outputs from species distribution models (SDMs). The...

The Tragedy of the Commons is a well studied problem in the literature of ecology, economics, and environmental policy which illustrates the deleterious consequences of managing common pool resources when individual and social incentives are misaligned. In this work, we apply a simple model of carbon sequestration in a deep saline aquifer by two neighboring geologic CO2 storage (GCS)...

Woody plant encroachment and row-crop agricultural land conversion are existential threats to species that rely on grassland ecosystems. The American Burying Beetle (Nicrophorus americanus) is a threatened species whose largest remnant populations are predominantly located in grassland ecoregions comprised of privately-owned ranching lands. Here, we seek to determine functional scaling...

No abstract available.

Environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling is an increasingly important tool for answering ecological questions and informing aquatic species management; however, several factors currently limit the reliability of ecological inference from eDNA sampling. Two particular challenges are (1) determining species source location(s) and (2) accurately and precisely measuring low concentration eDNA...

Coevolution between plants and their animal predators has led to diverse defensive adaptations. Multiple theories of defense propose that there are resource allocation costs associated with producing chemical defenses. One leading hypothesis, optimal defense theory (ODT), suggests that natural selection will result in the allocation of resources to defenses that optimize the cost-to...