Research

Current
As a member of the Temporal Ecology lab, working with Lizzie Wolkovich, I am now focusing on winegrapes and viticulture, especially phenology and predicting winter cold hardiness. I hope to find information on which varieties of winegrape might cope better with changes in late winter and spring temperatures caused by climate change. I also intend to link important phenological timing and constraints to local climate data to study the variation within winegrape growing regions, as well as suggest future trajectories for viticulture management. My work uses Bayesian hierarchical mixed effect models that I custom build in Stan through rstan in R.
   

Past
The main part of my PhD project, supervised by Professor Anne Magurran, focused on analysing the BioTIME database. This is a database of assemblage time series collected from all over the world and as many different habitats as possible. I also worked with researchers at the University of the West Indies. Here I was interested mostly in the freshwater fish assemblages, especially how the composition of the communities influences community properties such as predation, and how variable they are. I am also interested in the use of historical museum records held by the University of the West Indies in estimating regional species counts for under sampled taxa in Trinidad and Tobago.

As part of my work with University of the West Indies I assisted Dr Amy Deacon with a two week river sampling program quantifying fish, invertebrate and diatom communities in the Northern Range of Trinidad. 
As a researcher at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanic Garden (Yunnan, China), I worked with Dr Alice Hughes and Dr Sophie Williams to build species distribution maps of bat species. This involved mostly collating relevant GIS data layers and then using GIS and Maxent software, and then validating with species records.

For my Undergraduate dissertation I worked with the British Trust for Ornithology supervised by Dr Rachel Taylor on a project using GIS path analysis to analysis of oystercatchers Haematopus ostralegus historical roosting patterns. The aim of this project was to understand why the oystercatchers were changing their wintering roost locations. 

Publications