Inferring species interactions and their structure in empirical communities

I develop statistical methods to infer species interactions from data. Most traditional approaches rely on time-series data, which can be difficult and time-consuming to collect. I work on alternative methods that instead use “snapshots” of abundances from different combinations of species drawn from the same community. This approach is tractable and scalable for experimental communities, and can be used to predict abundances of unobserved species combinations. Additionally, these methods can reveal how interactions are structured. For example, I've used these tools to show that evolutionary history structures competition in plant communities, with more closely-related species competing more strongly.

Key publications:
Predicting coexistence in experimental ecological communities (2020) Nature Ecology & Evolution
Modeling ecological communities when composition is experimentally manipulated (2022) Methods in Ecology and Evolution
Phylogeny structures species’ interactions in experimental ecological communities (2024) Ecology Letters