food webs & biodiversity proxies

Most work on food webs and exploration of their wider properties to date has been on American and European sites. Research is absent in places like South and Southeast Asia, and Africa, where even basic food web research is lacking. The highly diverse ecosystems in these places face strong challenges due to climate change, environmental destruction, and other effects of high human density and burgeoning industrialisation, agricultural intensification and urbanisation. What makes this challenge more pressing is that a significant population of people are reliant on the provision of ecosystem services from these ecosystems. 

My lab is involved in actively collecting primary food web data from many locales in South Asia, along with enumeration of its ecosysteme services, liked at the species level. We are also striving to make these food webs as taxonomically detailed and as spatiotemporally resolved as possible. After constructing these networks, we use various network tools to analyze these food webs.

Fire and logging reduce the carbon stored in forests, but the long-term impact of forest degradation on animal communities remains unclear and using standard surveys to look at chnages are very cumbersome and require extensive taxonomic expertise. But using thousands of hours of ecosystem sounds recordings, one can investigate the acoustic fingerprint of the animal community (soundscapes!) to investigate animal community changes. We have done this in degraded Amazon forests following fire and logging. The emergent 24-h patterns of acoustic activity differed between logged and burned forests, and we observed large and sustained shifts in acoustic community assembly after multiple fires. These research projects demonstrate that acoustic monitoring holds promise for routine biodiversity assessments, even by non-experts, to capture a holistic measure of sound- producing animals and track ecosystem changes over time.

My lab continues to work on these datasets from the Amazon and other places around the world.