Research interests
A palaeoecologist by training, I have long been interested in using lake sediment records and other stratigraphic/palaeo data to improve our understanding of how ecosystems respond to environmental change. A particular interest is in developing and using modern statistical methods to tackle complex palaeoenvironmental problems, such as how to robustly estimate spatio-temporal trend models from large databases such as neotoma.
Over time, my interests have broadened to encompass recent environmental change recorded in contemporary monitoring studies or very recent lake sediment records. Knowing how lakes respond to change at the annual to decadal scale allows us to better interpret the longer-term records of change from the Holocene.
My research interests are broad and involve a strong quantitative element, but the overriding aim is to better understand how fresh water ecosystems are influenced by and record environmental change. Current research interests and projects include
- dynamical systems ecology & abrupt ecological change,
- climate change effects on arctic lakes,
- nitrogen pollution of remote oligotrophic lakes,
- recovery of lakes from acidification and eutrophication,
- climate change in the prairie of North America,
- development of GAMs for modelling trends in (palaeo)environmental time series,
- using topic models to summarize high-dimensional species data.
Examples of these and related projects can be found on the Publications page.
