Our lab uses a variety of quantitative and empirical tools to investigate the dynamics of marine populations and communities across a range of spatial and temporal scales.

The overall goal of the lab is to investigate factors affecting the population dynamics of marine fisheries across spatial scales. Consequently we work on topics ranging from small scales, focused on individual behavioral decisions (e.g., how do predators choose patches of prey?), to large scales, dealing with the influence of larval dispersal, oceanographic conditions, and fishery management strategies on source-sink dynamics, fishery productivity, and the design of marine protected areas.  In all of these efforts we utilize quantitative approaches that allow us to “scale up” small-scale processes to examine their population-level consequences, and vice versa.

Current research topics in our lab include the effects of size-selective mortality on the population dynamics of sex-changing fish, the role of nonconsumptive (fear) effects of predators on oyster populations, and methods to detect short-term changes in the size structure of fish populations due to changes in fishery management.