Jessica Haghkerdar

PhD Student

[email protected]

I am interested in community ecology, especially in multi-trophic communities. For my PhD, I will examine broad trends in ecological succession. Traditionally, succession research focuses primarily on plants and sessile animals; however, mobile animals are integral parts of ecological communities. I will use our existing knowledge to develop succession theory, drawing from diverse areas of community ecology (e.g. metacommunities, food webs, and community assembly theory). I also plan to collect my own data from successional systems, and to analyse existing timeseries data from the BioTIME database. The use of organismal traits will help to draw commonalities between diverse taxa and systems, and then to answer questions about how communities develop over successional time, and why we see temporal turnover in species composition.

Supervisors

Prof Maria Dornelas (University of St. Andrews),
Prof Brian McGill (University of Maine)