The living world is constantly facing greater threat from human activities. Although organisms and communities have long since evolved to tolerate natural disturbances, they can be ecologically naïve when coping with exposure to intensive novel perturbations (i.e. stressors), such as extreme climate change, toxic chemicals, and biological contaminants (e.g. invasive species). Organisms are increasingly being exposed to not only a single stessor but multiple stressors, either simultaneously or in series. Multiple stressors often interact synergistically or antagonistically, resulting in highly unpredictable cumulative impacts that we like to refer to as "ecological surprises".

An understanding of multiple ecological stressors is needed to better predict their cumulative impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem functions or services. We believe that the optimal way to develop and scientifically test such a theory is to integrate modeling, survey-based, and experimental methods. Classical ecological concepts (e.g., species niche) are being combined with relatively new ideas (e.g., species co-tolerance concept; Vinebrooke et al., 2004) to create a unifying general theory, which can be validated empirically across a range of different populations, communities, and ecosystems. Our ultimate goal is to then construct a predictive framework for forecasting the net effects of multiple ecological stressors on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems services.

We hope you enjoy learning more about our active and past research projects, along with becoming familiar with our lab members.