Modeling environmentally-mediated interactions

Many interactions between organisms occur indirectly, through modifications made to a shared environment. Competition for resources is a classic example, but environmentally-mediated interactions can take many forms. For instance, plants interact by making lasting changes to the chemical and microbial properties of the soil beneath them, and bacteria wrangle – sometimes to extinction – over the pH of their local environment. I develop mathematical models that capture the behavior of these varied interactions and help us understand how they impact the dynamics and structure of ecological communities.

Key publications:
Metapopulations with habitat modification (2021) PNAS
No robust multispecies coexistence in a canonical model of plant-soil feedbacks (2022) Ecology Letters
Stability criteria for the consumption and exchange of essential resources (2022) PLOS Computational Biology Habitat heterogeneity, environmental feedbacks, and species coexistence across timescales (2023) American Naturalist