From our oceans to savannas, animals must cope with dynamic environments that are undergoing unprecedented rates of change. How do animals make decisions in the face of such environmental changes, and what are the consequences of those decisions for individuals, populations, ecological communities, and—importantly—interactions with people? Examining these linkages is important for gaining mechanistic insight into how and why animal communities will be affected by global change, and for targeting effective conservation strategies.

Our Behavioral Ecophysics lab focuses on the study of organismal mechanisms (e.g., physiology, biomechanics) in light of biotic and abiotic interactions, with the goal of establishing explicit links between physical laws and rules of life, from individual to ecological scales. A central challenge of biological studies is to describe functional links between underlying architecture (e.g., genotype, phenotype) and emergent phenomena (e.g., performance, ecological patterns).