People
Current or Recent Lab Members
Daniel Reuman
Senior Scientist, Center for Ecological Researach
Principal Investigator
Dan is interested in quantitative approaches to ecological questions, principally community, population, and landscape ecology. He is currently focused on aspects of species distribution modelling and topics in metapopulation and community synchrony. Dan was a James S McDonnell Foundation Complex Systems Scholar, and a Humboldt Research Award winner. See also my github page.
Angel Robles
Angel is researching approaches to species niche and distribution modelling rooted in stochastic demography. His past work is diverse, and includes interests in wildlife susceptibility to infectious diseases at global scales, links between population genetics and deep-time habitat suitability, and species interactions.
Nat Coombs
Nat is doing diverse research projects connected to synchrony, including projects involving human death time series in US states, synchrony of fish movements in California rivers, and synchrony of remote-sensed vegetation signals.
Ethan Kadiyala
Ethan is a student in the Castorani lab at UVA and Ethan and members of that lab have long collaborated with the Reuman lab. But Ethan recently started a fellowship co-mentored by Reuman, so he’s listed here, too. Why not.
Vadim Karatayev
Vadim is completing several projects related to resilience. He was an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow and has recently (summer 2024) started a new position as William J Higgins Endowed Assistant Professorship of Biology at the University of Maryland.
Onofrio Mazzarisi
Onofrio is completing projects related to the relationship between diversity and stability, and to sub-linear self limitation of population growth. Onofrio went on (fall 2023) to a postdoc with the potential to become a permanent position at the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics and at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy.
Deidric Davis
Deidric Davis is a marine ecologist, scientific communicator, AAUS scuba diver and published researcher who has recently graduated with a B.S in Marine Science and a B.A. Animal Studies from Eckerd College. He has worked for UCLA, UCSB, Duke University and KU during his time as a student. His published literature centers around deep sea parasitology and trophic ecology. He also runs a really great podcast, Black Nerds Matter on WMNF (transcripts available on request), and here is Deidric Davis's website.
Aleyna Loughran-Pierce
Aleyna is an REU student through the Coastal-Heartland Marine Biology Exchange that Reuman co-leads.
Fernando Miguelena
Fernando is an REU student through the Coastal-Heartland Marine Biology Exchange that Reuman co-leads.
Sela Raisl
Sela is an REU student through the Coastal-Heartland Marine Biology Exchange that Reuman co-leads. She is a junior at Cal Poly Humboldt and is studying both marine biology and mathematics. After graduating, she plans on exploring anthropogenic influence on marine systems through quantitative biology.
Past postdocs and PhD students
Daniel R. O’Donnell
Danny was a postdoc in the Rypel Lab at UC Davis, also affiliated with the Reuman lab, working on a project involving the movement, including synchronous movement, of freshwater fish in California. The project made heavy use of telemetry measurements and large dataset analysis. Reuman was a mentor and collaborator on the project. In some of his previous work, Danny studied the dynamics of phytoplankton and zooplankton in Lake Erie and the physical, chemical and biological drivers of those dynamics. Danny moved on to a permanent position as Senior Environmental Scientist at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife Water Branch.
Scott Colborne
Scott was a postdoc in the Rypel Lab at UC Davis, also affiliated with the Reuman lab, working on a project involving the movement, including synchronous movement, of freshwater fish in California. The project made heavy use of telemetry measurements and large dataset analysis. Reuman was a mentor and collaborator on the project. In some of his previous, Scott was involved in major telemetry projects for great lakes fish, among other interests. Scott moved on to a permanent position as Research Scientist at the Quantitative Fisheries Center at Michigan State University.
Lawrence Sheppard
Lawrence William Sheppard was an undergraduate at Cambridge University (Natural Sciences) and did his PhD in the Lancaster University Physics Department (Nonlinear and Biomedical Physics). He worked with Dan, studying population synchrony, in collaboration with Rothamsted Research, the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science (SAHFOS), and many other organizations and individuals worldwide, mostly on projects having to do with synchrony. He now is in a permanent research position with the UK Marine Biological Association.
Shyamolina Ghosh
Shyamolina got her PhD in chemistry from the University of Calcutta in 2017. She works with Dan applying the statistical concept of a copula to ecological and environmental datasets of a variety of types. After three years in the Reuman lab, Shyamolina moved on to a postdoc in Switzerland.
Shyamolina’s Google Scholar profile
Lei Zhao
Lei is interested in population dynamics in a food web and ecological applications of complex network theory. He is also interested in the effects of warming on aquatic communities. Currently he is working on spatial synchrony and Taylor’s law and the relationship between them. Lei’s recent or ongoing projects include: 1) spatial synchrony of phytoplankton in the California Current, and 2) the determinants of Taylor’s law slopes, as well as some new forms of Taylor’s law. Lei moved on to an associate professor job in Beijing.
Lei’s Google Scholar profile
Lei’s Researchgate profile
Tom Anderson
Tom obtained a BS from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (Biology), a MS at Murray State University (Water Science), and a PhD from the University of Missouri (Biology). While in the Reuman lab, Tom worked on spatial synchrony and its causes for a variety of taxa, including freshwater plankton, white-tailed deer and amphibians. He also worked collaboratively with Dan, Lawrence Sheppard, and Jon Walter to implement recently developed methods that can test for timescale and geographic structure in patterns of synchrony in these systems. In addition to his work on synchrony, Tom has ongoing field research projects on the population and community ecology of pond-breeding salamanders, the focal organisms of his dissertation work. Tom is now faculty in Illinois.
Anderson Lab website
Jonathan Walter
Jon studies space-time patterns in populations and communities, often focusing on insect pests like the gypsy moth. His projects while officially a member of the Reuman lab focussed on geographies of synchrony in a variety of empirical and theoretical settings, and the impacts of climate variability and climate change on insect outbreaks. From the Reuman lab, Jon moved on to independent fellowships and research positions, and still frequently works with members and past members of the Reuman lab.
Jonathan Walter’s Google site
Brandon Mechtley
Brandon was broadly interested in the application of signal processing and machine learning to the study of population ecology and studied theoretical models of the propagation of synchrony throughout trophic networks across space at multiple timescales. Prior to working at KU, his background was in applying techniques in multimedia information retrieval and computer music synthesis to the study of acoustic ecology, specifically focusing on the analysis and synthesis of natural soundscapes.
Georgina Adams, PhD
Graduated 2015.
Georgina’s background is in a mix of mathematics, evolutionary biology and ecology. For her PhD, she examined community structure in aquatic systems. Specifically, she studied spatial and temporal trends in size-based metrics of community structure, and the effects of climate and other pressures on body size in those systems. In her spare time she bakes, knits, and explores London.
Georgina’s Twitter
Emma Defriez, PhD
Graduated 2016.
Emma’s work focuses on global patterns of metapopulation synchrony of primary producers and changes in synchrony in plankton. She works together with Lawrence Sheppard, and with Chris Reid from the Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science (SAHFOS). Emma’s analyses have focused so far on the Continuous Plankton Recorder database of SAHFOS, as well as on satellite data on plankton, terrestrial productivity, and environmental variables; as well as on new analytic approaches to synchrony.
Bernardo Garcia-Carreras, PhD
Graduated 2012. Became a permanent researcher at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries, and Aquaculture Science.
Bernardo’s work aims to improve our understanding of how populations respond to anthropogenic environmental changes, and whether these responses generalise across taxa and geographical locations. During his PhD, Bernardo worked on the effects of environmental noise on population dynamics, providing the first empirical link between the “spectral color” of environmental fluctuations and the spectral color of population fluctuations. The “spectral color” of a population or environmental time series is a measure that characterizes its temporal autocorrelation, or year-to-year persistence. Theoretical links had been well studied, but Bernardo’s study was the first empirical evidence in field systems. He also used population models to address the question of whether climate-change-related alterations in means or variances of climate signals are more important for population dynamics. Bernardo’s approach uses simple theoretical and computational models, supported by analyses of relevant case studies, and analysis of large datasets (of, e.g., climate, fishing pressure, population dynamics, and life cycle events). Currently and in the future, Bernardo is using these approaches to help policy makers manage impacts on populations.
Lawrence Hudson, PhD
Graduated 2012. Became a postdoc at Imperial College London in the lab of Andy Purvis, then moved to the London Natural History Museum with Andy’s lab. He now has a permanent research job at NHM.
During his PhD Lawrence examined the relationship between the dynamics and structure of complex, multi-trophic ecological communities. This has historically been a difficult area to investigate because mathematical models of the dynamics of systems of realistic complexity have a large number of unmeasured parameters, and whole-community data are limited and typically comprise only a snapshot or time-averaged picture. The resulting ‘plague of parameters’ means most studies of multi-species population dynamics have been very theoretical. Results are published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2013. Lawrence also worked on methods, producing an R package that has seen substantial use in the community; and on the body-mass scaling of field metabolic rates in birds and mammals.
Lawrence at The Natural History Museum at South Kensington
Lisa Signorile, PhD
Graduated 2014. Jointly supervised with Chris Carbone, Jinliang Wang, Peter Lurz, and Sandro Bertolino.
Lisa’s main interests are on the ecology and population genetics of small mammals and other vertebrates. For her PhD she investigated the genetic determinants that promote American grey squirrel invasiveness in Europe, using classic population genetics methodologies. Her results show that low genetic diversity is significantly correlated with reduced propensity to spread, and reduced speed of population range expansion. However, long-distance, human related translocations were the cause for the unabated and fast spread of these mammals in the highly fragmented European landscapes where the species has been introduced. Lisa also has a keen interest in promoting science, and has written books and works as a science writer in Italy to serve this aim, alongside her scientific career.
Lisa’s books (in Italian), Il Viaggio e la Necessità, Il Coccodrillo Come Fa and L’orologiaio miope.
Lisa’s National Geographic blog (in Italian).
Julieta Decarre, PhD
Graduated 2015. Jointly supervised with Chris Carbone, Zoological Society of London.
Julieta’s research focuses on population and community ecology, particularly on the distribution and abundance patterns of wildlife in human modified landscapes. She is interested in understanding how different agricultural practices and anthropogenic changes in land cover may affect bird and mammal persistence. She is a field biologist addressing these questions through comparative and spatial analyses. Her work also aims to improve and implement effective monitoring designs and techniques such as the use of camera traps to monitor mammalian biodiversity. Prior to starting her PhD, Julieta worked for the National Institute of Agricultural Technology of Argentina (INTA). An important part of her work at INTA was to develop strategies and management recommendations to balance trade-offs between food production and conservation needs.
Julieta’s INTA website (in Spanish).
A video related to Julieta’s work (in Spanish).
Drew Wilson
Drew transferred fully to Tom’s lab when Dan left Imperial.
Past masters students
Adeola Adeboje. Cross environmental variable synchrony.
James Chris Terry. Detecting signatures of physiology in dynamics: direct tests of allometrically parameterized food web models. Became a PhD student at Oxford University.
Simon Mills. Measuring histories of habitat fragmentation using terrageny metrics offers fresh insight into fragmented landscapes. Became a PhD student at the University of Sheffield.
Yaodong Yang. Dispersal and island biogeography. Primary supervisor James Rosindell. Became a PhD student at the University of Southampton.
Laura Nunes. Potential trends in the sensitivity of long term growth rate to changes in the mean and standard deviation of environmental conditions. Became a PhD student at University College London.
Melissa Guzman. The inflationary effects of temporal autocorrelation provide persistence in multi-trophic sink metacommunities. Became a PhD student at McGill University.
Paul Rassell. Replicability of ecological community dynamics and the measures which characterize them: a study of innate variability in real and simulated communities. Became a PhD student at Imperial College London.
Shiyu Li. On the relative importance of changes in the mean and variability of climatic signals for the long-term stochastic growth rate of an age-structured population.
Rosemary Moorhouse-Gann. An American invasion: the origins, genetic diversity, and population structure of the American grey squirrel in Cumbria. Became a PhD student at the University of Cardiff.
Harkiran Bhogal. Temperature and optimal swimming speed in fish.
Sean Webber. Reconstructing the rise and demise of two squirrel species in Great Britain: Testing the role of forest cover.
Dimitrios Nerantzis. Predicting imposed chaos in the population dynamics of an insect species. Became a PhD student at Imperial College London.
Guo-Heng Chin. Abundance-occupancy relationships in deep-sea fish species. Primary supervisor Julia Blanchard.
Georgina Adams. Body size and species composition of diatoms in Icelandic streams. Became a PhD student at Imperial College London.
Yangchen Lin. The link between maximum likelihood and the forecast accuracy of mechanistic population models. Became a PhD student at Cambridge University. Yangchen won the Gerald Durrell award for best thesis in his MSc in his year.
Yesim Dodlani. Spatial and temporal scaling of the abundance spectrum.
Carmen Suriel-Melchor. The effects of climate change on bird population dynamics in North America.
Silvia Antonelli. Modeling the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a temperature-dependent consumer-resource system. Primary supervisor Tim Barraclough.
Oliver Wearn. Extinction debt in the Brazilian Amazon. Oliver’s master’s thesis work was eventually published in Science. Became a PhD student at Imperial College London.
Lawrence Hudson. Dynamics of complex food webs: Empirical verification of models. Became a PhD student at Imperial College London.
Yajun Sun. Distributions of average species body masses in local community food webs. Became a PhD student at the University of Toronto.
Past undergraduate research students
Noah Pyle, University of Kansas, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and Kalamazoo College, Coastal Heartland Marine Biology Exchange REU student.
Edgar Nickols, University of Kansas, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, and Haskell Indian Nations University, Coastal Heartland Marine Biology Exchange REU student.
Miriam Wanner, University of Virginia, The geography of synchrony of giant kelp.
Isaiah Erb, University of Kansas, The influence of topography on the geography of synchrony of terrestrial vegetation.
Jasmin Albert, University of Kansas, Storage effects and tail associations.
Thomas Gartman, University of Kansas, Geography of synchrony of terrestrial vegetation in urban areas.
Noah Mohabbat, University of Kansas.
Madeleine Muller, University of Kansas.
Carter Pilch, University of Kansas, Synchrony of five common amphibian species in Minnesota.
Goma Karki, University of Kansas, Jon Walters was Goma’s main supervisor.
Jacob Peterson, University of Kansas, Relationships between patterns of synchrony in taxonomically and ecologically similar species in the North Sea.
Emilie Tarouilly, Imperial College London, Environmental drivers of global synchrony in phytoplankton.
Sharmila Rana, Imperial College London, Is change in the mean or the variability of a climate variable more important for extinction risk in a density dependent population model?
Richard Clifton, Imperial College London, Can extinctions be predicted after anthropogenic perturbations to ecosystems?
Jonathan Chan, Imperial College London, Competition and the effects of temperature.
Sean Jordan, Imperial College London, Competition and the effects of temperature.
Alexander Kazhdan, Imperial College London, Predicting extinctions in food webs.
Lucy Li, Imperial College London, The predictive power of R* in a two-predator one-prey Lotka-Volterra model.
Timothy Saunders, Imperial College London, What are the most important questions in ecology for the 21st century?
Ryota Nakamura, Imperial College London, Murder rates are higher when the weather is warmer.
Andrew Brockman, Imperial College London, Are top predators really on top?
Feng Wang, Imperial College London, Confidence intervals for population viability analysis.
Thomas Britton, Imperial College London, Latitudinal biodiversity gradients.
Edward Stephens, Imperial College London, An unwritten future: defining the global water shortage and the multidimensional crisis facing China’s national security.
Cai GoGwilt, Rockefeller University, New York, Population models with mechanistic stochasticity.
Daniella Schittler, Rockefeller University, New York, Emergent properties of tri-trophic interactions and food chains in food webs with abundances and body masses.