Welcome to our lab!
We are a group of passionate, broadminded marine biologist. As members of the Centre for Intergrative Ecology and the Marine Ecology Research Group (MERG) within the School of Biological Sciences, we are part of a diverse community of inspiring scientists at The University of Canterbury. Prospective students are encouraged to contact us after familiarizing themselves with our general areas of work and expertise.
We combine experiments, surveys, analysis of long-term data-sets, modeling, and meta-analysis to test how patterns in biological communities are generated and maintained. We work closely with collaborators and stakeholders on local and regional scales within New Zealand as well as with world-leading scientist from Europe, North America and Australia to keep our science locally and internationally relevant.
Our work covers a broad range of topics in biology and community ecology, including biodiversity, species interaction webs, global environmental change, and ecosystem functioning/services. We focus in particular on how human stressors, such as biological invasions, pollution, habitat destruction and climate change, impact the structure and biodiversity of aquatic ecosystems. This work allows us to make predictions about how coastal habitats will respond to human stressors and make recommendations for conservation strategies needed to ameliorate their impacts.