I am an ecologist studying how global change -- including land use, climate change, and wildlife loss -- shapes biodiversity and ecosystem functioning across spatial and temporal scales. My research integrates long-term field data, plant-animal interactions, and collaborative biodiversity monitoring to understand how ecosystems respond to disturbance, management, and environmental change, and how these responses can inform conservation, restoration, and sustainable management.
Monitoring landscape-scale change and conservation outcomes
I develop and apply biodiversity and ecosystem monitoring approaches to evaluate how land use, restoration, and management interventions influence ecological outcomes across landscapes, with a focus on generating evidence that can inform conservation decisions.
Felled tree in a logging concession in Gabon
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In Gabon, I examined the long-term ecological effects of very low-intensity selective logging (<2 trees/ha), showing that while logging causes small, short-term shifts in understory diversity and structure (link), key ecosystem services such as carbon storage and fruit availability for wildlife are maintained (link), and regeneration dynamics returns to pre-logging levels ~4-14 years after logging occurs (link).
At a global scale, I conducted a global meta-analysis which demonstrated that sacred forests protected for cultural reasons harbor biodiversity levels comparable to formally protected areas, highlighting the contributions of these small-sized and community managed areas for biodiversity conservation (link). |
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More recently, I have developed collaborations with NGO, university, and government partners in Rwanda and Kenya to design and implement biodiversity monitoring frameworks that assess park-to-regional scale restoration and management outcomes. Check out the Community-Based Biodiversity Conservation (COMBIO) project -- the biodiversity component to the Transforming Eastern Province Through Adaptation (TREPA) project for more information about work with Rwanda collaborators. Ongoing work with Save the Elephants, the Mount Kenya Trust, and government partners focuses on developing a biodiversity framework for monitoring wildlife in the Mt. Kenya landscape. |
A buffer zone surrounding a dam — one of seven land-use types surveyed in the Eastern Province of Rwanda as a part of the COMBIO project.
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Wildlife as drivers of ecosystem structure and function
I study how wildlife -- particularly ecosystem engineers such as elephants and chimpanzees -- shape ecosystems, informing understanding about ecosystem change under wildlife loss and helping predict the potential outcomes of rewilding to restore ecosystem function.
Focusing on forest elephants in the Congo Basin, I have shown that seed dispersal impacts are highly context dependent, with strong site-level variation in the species and functional traits dispersed (link). Through this work, I introduced the concept of the carbon storage potential of elephant seed dispersal and am extending this framework to other wildlife and ecosystems, including chimpanzees in Rwanda. I have further demonstrated how elephant foraging around fruiting trees impacts understory communities (link) and how movement along trails generate trade-offs between seed dispersal benefits and seedling establishment (link).
Forest elephant foraging for fruit. Photo: Liam Jasperse-Sjolander.
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.Seedlings sprouting in an elephant dung pile in the forest in in Gabon.
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Ongoing work leverages long-term data from the ForestGEO vegetation plot network to quantify how long forests retain an “elephant signature” following population collapse and to assess context dependence of elephant impacts beyond seed dispersal. Together, this research provides an ecological basis for predicting how forest structure, carbon storage, and biodiversity shift under defaunation, and how rewilding may restore lost ecosystem functions. By linking wildlife-driven processes to measurable carbon and biodiversity outcomes, this work can help incorporate wildlife into conservation finance mechanisms.
Climate change and ecological resilience
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My work examines how plants and ecosystems respond to climatic variation across elevation, biomes, and time, with a focus on phenology, functional traits, and ecological resilience under global change.
Using trait-based approaches, I have examined plant strategies along strong environmental gradients, including elevational transects in the Gongga Mountains, China (link), and macroecological patterns of leaf traits across the Brazilian Cerrado in comparison with Amazonian systems (link). Using phenology, I led a review synthesizing evidence for climate-driven shifts in flowering and fruiting and implications for frugivorous wildlife species (link). Additionally, analyses of 25 years of phenology data from Nyungwe National Park, Rwanda, show increasing annual fruit production in this high-elevation forest, opposite to patterns at lower elevations (link). Seasonal fruiting peaks also shifted from the dry to the wet season, suggesting that keystone food resources are changing and that chimpanzees may need to adjust foraging strategies across the landscape. |
Phenology monitoring using binoculars.
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