This project brings together a collaborative, multidisciplinary team of US social and natural scientists and Ulithian community members, building upon a long-standing relationship among scientists and community members through the One People One Reef program in Ulithi Atoll. Our goal is to engage in convergence research around the feedback mechanisms among governance and decisions around marine resource extraction, the impacts of extraction on the marine environment health, and adaptive capacity of governance systems to accommodate changes to those relationships. This work aims to co-create solutions to marine resource management and environmental degradation through the integration of Western and Indigenous knowledge system. We focus on the introduction of modern, individualistic fishing technologies (motorboats and spearguns) with high ecological impact into otherwise relatively traditional, communal-based governance systems to serve as a model system for examining the role that fishing plays in social and ecological well-being of traditionally managed coral reef SESs.

The Southern Ocean is a classic “canary in the coalmine” for the impacts of rapid climate change and anthropogenic disturbance on ecosystem function and resilience. This research provides an unprecedented look into how past climate change and historic whaling altered polar food webs through time, using penguins as bioindicators of ecosystem health. This research provides a window into predicted future food web responses in a rapidly warming World.

Deep-sea proteinaceous corals serve as “living sediment traps,” recording geochemical information about the organic matter sinking to depth from the sunlit surface ocean. In these projects, we are applying molecular geochemistry tools to deep-sea proteinaceous corals to reconstruct past changes in phytoplankton community dynamics and biogeochemical cycling on decadal to millennial time scales. This work provides insights into how changing food web architecture influences everything from ocean productivity to biogeochemical cycling and the efficacy of the biological pump.

Coastal marine ecosystems are among the most productive and biodiverse ecosystems on Earth and provide critical goods and services to humans. These systems are also under tremendous pressure from direct and indirect human-environment interactions. Our research looks to address how food web architecture influences the structure, function, and resilience of coastal ecosystems by quantifying the sources and cycling of organic matter supporting coastal food webs.

Our goal is to advance our mechanistic understanding of the impact of microplastics, pollution, disease and ocean warming on commercially important shellfish species. We aim to improve our risk-assessment capabilities, by focussing on testing a novel hypothesis that microplastics will enhance the impact of pollutants and pathogens within marine food webs (e.g. Eastern Oyster, Crassostrea virginica). In turn, we are examining how predator-prey relationships with higher trophic level consumers are impacted under future ocean warming scenarios (e.g. Blue Crab, Callinectes sapidus), and quantify the potential for food web transfer of microplastics, pollutants and disease.

Through controlled laboratory experiments, our lab seeks to better understand the underlying biochemical and physiological mechanisms behind how organisms acquire, modify, and allocate dietary resources. The two primary foci of our controlled laboratory studies are to: 1) develop, expand, and refine amino acid carbon isotope fingerprinting to reconstruct the phylogenetic identity of primary producers fueling food web dynamics, and 2) quantify mechanisms of nitrogen isotope fractionation associated with trophic transfer. In doing so, this work advances the development of cutting-edge new CSIA tools while also improving our understanding of organismal nutritional ecology.