Projects and Events
Grain Farmers of Ontario Legacy Scholarship 2024
Thank you immensely, Grain Farmers of Ontario, for this scholarship. It is a humbling honour to receive it.
My talk at the 3rd Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology (starts at 10:55)
Contact me if you have questions or want to talk more!
Curiosity Carnival
I was a panellist at the “Curiosity Carnival”, a Sci Comm event organized by Guelph Physics & Royal City Science. There was a screening of “Kiss the Ground” (available on Netflix), a documentary about the role that regenerative farming could play in reversing climate change.
Soil and leaf-litter biodiversity along an elevational gradient
Agroecosystems have provided me with a great sandbox where I could control biotic and abiotic variables. However, there are limitations to the research context that restrict my ability to fully explore the complexity of the relationship between invertebrate community structure and the functions they provide. To better understand this relationship requires a more diverse, natural experiment.
The Área de Conservación Guanacaste (ACG), in northwestern Costa Rica, is a biodiversity hotspot - estimated home to at least 2.6 % of global diversity (Smith et al., 2014). The natural (elevation) and anthropogenic (forest degradation/agriculture) gradients within ACG provide an excellent opportunity to understand how soil biodiversity varies over naturally occurring abiotic and biotic gradients.
Invertebrate biodiversity in agricultural fields
I'm interested in validating metabarcoding as a method to detect species of interest as part of Integrated Pest Management (IPM). Stay tuned for our paper!