My students, collaborators (Mike Steele, Harmony Dalgleish, Nate Lichti) and I seek to understand how environmental context influences foraging decisions of rodents and the fate of tree seeds that they eat and disperse.
In particular, we ask how mast composition, seed attributes, and fear affect foraging behavior and ultimately seed dispersal and survival. Answers to these questions are important because of the likely role of rodents (and other consumers) in ongoing oak regeneration failure and planned restoration of a blight-resistant chestnut in eastern forests. I’ve also studied, in collaboration with John Bryant and others, how environmental factors influence biogeographic variation in interactions of plants and herbivorous mammals as mediated by fire and secondary metabolites. These findings have direct implications for evolution of plant-herbivore systems in the face of climate change.