Costa Rican Countryside
My current dissertation work focuses in understanding the differences in insect communities across land-use and precipitation gradients in Costa Rica. My most extensive work is in the south of the Country, along the border with Panama between 800 and 1200 m on the Pacific slope. We work in 23 sites including sun-grown coffee, shade-grown coffee, secondary fragments, and primary forests. Using a variety of trapping methods I have sampled these communities in both the wet and dry season to look for the independent and potential interactive effects of land-use and precipitation on community makeup. We are using both traditional morphological methods and emerging genetic techniques to characterize the insect community. This work is done in collaboration with Dr. Gretchen Daily and J. Nicholas Hendershot with support from the American Philosophical Society, the Stanford Center for Latin American Studies, the Organization for Tropical Studies, and the Moore Family Foundation. We are complimenting this work with further studies in collaboration with Dr. Daniel Karp (UC-Davis) in the Guanacaste region in Northwestern Costa Rica that systematically varies sites locations along both precipitation and land-use gradients.
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New England Old Fields
For my Masters thesis I worked in 16 old fields (managed grasslands) throughout southern New England. These fields were purposefully chosen to span a gradient of human land-use with our most 'urban' sites being located < 100 m from I-95 and the furthest a 15 minute hike from the closest paved road. We found that the human land-use surrounding the field directly changed the makeup of the insect community, which indirectly affected the plant community and even soil carbon levels. This work was done in collaboration with Dr. Os Schmitz, Rob Buchkowski, and Dr. Adam Rosenblatt and was funded by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Yale Institute of Biospheric Studies.
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