Research Interests
I am broadly interested in landscape ecology and conservation. More specifically, my research interests include:
• Landscape-scale plant community ecology
• The interactions between land use/land cover and ecological processes
• The effects of human land management on ecological processes
• Using ecoinformatic approaches to study regional-scale ecological processes

Dissertation Research
For my dissertation, I am studying landscape-scale restoration of the longleaf pine ecosystem on North Carolina’s Coastal Plain. Longleaf pine communities provide important habitat for many wildlife and plant species, but has declined over the past two centuries, due to land development, fire suppression, and habitat fragmentation. I am studying the social and ecological factors that influence restoration of longleaf pine communities in the Onslow Bight landscape. In this landscape, I am asking: How do management priorities and the landscape surrounding restored longleaf pine sites affect restoration outcomes?

To answer this question, I am combining a survey of stakeholders in the Onslow Bight with a spatial analysis of how landscape patterns at various scales relate to plant diversity. The result is an interdisciplinary study of ecological restoration in the landscape.

Current Projects
Currently, I am involved in two main projects, which inspire and form the basis for my dissertation research:
  1. Correlates of Plant Species Diversity in the Southeast US
  2. The Nature Conservancy's Onslow Bight Project
1. Correlates of Plant Species Diversity in the Southeast US
This is a NASA-funded research study (PIs Aaron Moody and Bob Peet) focused on examining the environmental factors that control plant species diversity across Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The overarching research question is: 1. How do plant productity, stability, and spatial heterogeneity affect plant species diversity in the Southeast?

DDS_NCCoast
This is a big question, and is an area of active research in ecology. We are uniquely positioned to address this question because of our access to a rich data set of allmost 9000 vegetation plots in the three-state area, which provides species diversity data. These plots were sampled by the Carolina Vegetation Survey and Virginia Natural Heritage and provide a rare opportunity to study plant communities at a fine grain across a large extent. We are using satellite-derived measures of plant productivity from MODIS and LANDSAT sensors, as well as a variety of other spatial data sets, to derive measures our environmental correlates.

Within the larger study, I have worked on three projects:
  1. How does habitat heterogeneity affect plant species richness across the three-state area, and particularly on the NC Coastal Plain?
  2. What is the relative influence of environmental characteristics, landscape structure, and management history on plant species diversity in longleaf pine communities on the NC Coastal Plain?
  3. What is the relationship between beta-diversity and productivity across NC, SC, and VA?
2. The Nature Conservancy's Onslow Bight Project
onslow_bight_landscape
The Onslow Bight is a collaborative landscape-scale conservation effort among The Nature Conservancy, Department of Defense Camp LeJeune, Catan National Forest, NC Wildlife Resources Commission, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and several other state and local agencies. The collaboration provides a mechanism for planning conservation and restoration of species and habitats across the landscape. There is also an Onslow Bight Fire Management Partnership, which aims to reduce barriers to prescribedburning for restoration of longleaf pine and associated plant communities.

Since 2005, I have been involved with the Fire Partnership. I have provided support to prescribed burning planning efforts in the landscape by conducting spatial analyses. I have also been directly involved with the national LANDFIRE project. The Onslow Bight is a LANDFIRE application site, in which we are testing the utility of LANDFIRE data for our purposes and providing feedback to the LANDFIRE team. I have also collaborated with the Southeast Gap Analysis Project to examine the potential effects of various prescribed burning objectives on vegetation communities and wildlife species.