NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology
June 2022 - May 2024​

INTEGRATING PHENOLOGY AND SPECIES INTERACTIONS INTO PREDICTIONS OF SPRING EPHEMERAL DISTRIBUTIONS

Using living collections of plants across a regional network of arboreta and botanical gardens, our team addresses whether phenological plasticity of plant traits (flowering, fruiting, senescence) and critical plant-animal interactions (pollination, dispersal, herbivory) can mitigate climate change-driven range shifts in spring ephemerals. In collaboration with community scientists, data collected across this common garden will be integrated into Trait-Based Distribution Models to incorporate species interactions, phenology, plasticity, and local adaptation into predictions of future plant distributions under climate change. Work conducted in collaboration with members of the Stuble Lab at The Holden Arboretum.

(left) Dr. Katie Stuble, Community Ecologist @ Holden Arboretum

(below) de facto common garden network consisting of five botanical gardens and arboreta across the Midwest and southeastern US. 

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Past Postdoctoral research 
​2020 - 2022

I was a postdoc in Dr. Kamal Gandhi's Forest Entomology Lab at the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources at the University of Georgia from September 2020 - June 2022.

My work focused on the impacts of severe wind disturbances on populations and community assembly of subcortical insects (Cerambycids and Buprestids) in southeastern U.S. planted and natural pine forests. During this postdoc, I collaborated broadly with private foresters, USDA USFS employees, and students, faculty and staff at UGA and beyond. 

February 2023 - New publication out in Forest Science!

​Woodboring beetle (Buprestidae, Cerambycidae) responses to Hurricane Michael in variously damaged southeastern US pine plantations.

Hurricane Michael made landfall in the Florida Panhandle in October 2018, causing catastrophic timber damage. Various damaged pine stands were sampled in 2019 and 2020 for subcortical woodboring beetles, which can exacerbate economic losses via tunneling of wood. Trap catches were highest in moderate-damage stands in 2019 but not in 2020. There were not exponential increases in woodborers, possibly due to rapid breakdown of debris in the hot climatic conditions and higher degree of salvage-logging from 2019 to 2020. Moderately to highly disturbed stands may be scheduled for earlier salvage-logging. 

Fig. 3: 
Boxplots depicting differences in means (diamonds), medians (horizontal lines), interquartile ranges (whiskers), and outliers (points) for standardized mean trap catches across damage categories for Acanthocinus obsoletus in a) 2019 and b) 2020; Monochamus spp. in c) 2019 and d) 2020; and Xylotrechus sagittatus in e) 2019 and f) 2020.