Research Interests

I am primarily interested in multiple stressor research and trophic ecology. Disentangling the non-additive effects (synergisms and antagonism) of multiple anthropogenic stressors at the higher levels of biological organisation (e.g. food webs and ecosystems) is a key focus of my research. I am also interested in predator-prey, parasite, freshwater and quantitative ecology.

PhD Research

My PhD project, based on multiple stressors, climate change and freshwater food webs, is part of Prof. Piggott's IRC Laureate ExStream Project. In this large project, myself and two other PhD students (in University College Dublin and University of Otago) will run two large field experiments in New Zealand and Ireland using the ExStream System. We will investigate how freshwater ecosystems respond to the individual and combined effects of three climate change stressors: (i) elevated temperatures, (ii) increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and (iii) modified flow patterns. We will study the impacts of these stressors and their interactions on a wide range of freshwater taxa from the periphyton to vertebrates. Using this large dataset I will construct food webs and carry out ecological network modeling to gain a fuller understanding of how the multiple stressors of climate change will impact freshwater ecosystems.