Spatial Ecology of Plant-Pollinator Interactions in Fragmented Habitats
In the wake of unprecedented insect decline, the looming threat of losing our most important native pollinators weighs heavy. As rampant conversion of natural landscapes continues to threaten pollinators in the Anthropocene, there is an urgent need to better understand the dynamics of plant-pollinator communities in a changing environment. To help understand these dynamics, I use ecological and spatial data to assess the impact of human-driven landscape change on pollination interactions. By combining field-collected observational and GIS data, I am exploring how habitat fragmentation and land-use change may influence flower-visitation patterns in natural communities. I am currently focused on using these methods in heavily fragmented natural ecosystems of conservation concern to inform current restoration/maintenance efforts.
Interaction Specialization and Pollinator Genetic Diversity
How does a pollinator's generalist/specialist foraging preferences influence its genetic diversity? Does the wide foraging breadth or migratory capability of generalist pollinators result in higher genetic diversity than is seen in interaction specialists? I am interested in exploring these questions by leveraging global datasets of plant-pollinator interaction and genetic sequence data.
More to come soon!
More to come soon!
Phylogeography of Specialist Pollinators
Using species-level phylogenetic, phylogeographic, and ecological niche modeling, I hope to explore how past environmental variation has contributed to the evolution of the rare pollen specialist bee, Andrena gardineri. This sparsely sampled bee has been relatively abundant in our Serpentine study areas and forages on dense patches of Ragwort (Packera) flowers. How does the genetic structure of this bee vary across it's range? Are the far West Colorado populations genetically distinct from those found in the Eastern states? How different is the genetic structure of the populations foraging in the once expansive Eastern Serpentine Grassland remnants? I am interested in exploring these questions using phylogenetic methods developed in the EspíndoLab, field-collected specimens from my own fieldwork, and museum specimens from across the species known range. Using this data we can home in on the species genetic diversity, population structure, effective populaton sizes, and signals of local adaptation to infer how a changing climate and landscape influenced this species evolutionary trajectory.
More to come soon! |
Future Directions
While learning about some of my current research endeavors, many avenues of potentially interesting questions have enticed me. Broadly, I would like my future work to integrate community and genetic data to inform conservation of beneficial insect communities. More specifically, I would like to understand how quantitative plant-pollinator networks can be better applied to habitat restoration and plant/pollinator conservation. I would also like to explore how specialist pollinators actually contribute to pollination services rendered to natural plant communities; generalized networks are thought to be robust to species loss but when specialists are lost and filled in by generalist redundancy, is there a loss of pollination quality or efficiency?