Welcome!

I am in my fourth year as a PhD student in Dartmouth's Ecology and Evolutionary Biology program, working in Matt Ayres' lab on various aspect of beech bark disease in northeastern North America. For more information on the details of beech bark disease, click here.

For the past three field seasons, I have been travelling to sites established ca. 1979 by Dave Houston and monitored by researchers from the USFS and various state forest services. I collect data on tree demography, stand and tree condition, and estimate population abundance for the scale insects and fungi associated with beech bark disease. Sites are widely dispersed, from Maine to West Virginia. The duration of infection with beech bark disease varies roughly with latitute; sites in closest proximity to the initial point of introduction of scale insects in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1890 tend to have the longest history with beech bark disease. This offers the opportunity to study effects on forest stands along a gradient of disease ontogeny and severity. I am using these long-term population estimates, spatially-explicit data I've collected at a subset of sites, and landscape-level records from the USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis project to try and put together a cohesive story concerning the current and projected effects of beech bark disease on the structure and function of Northeastern forests.