Maurer, Brian

Ecology is understood to be the study of phenomena that occur on a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. My interest focuses on the largest spatial and longest temporal scales studied by ecologists.  To understand the importance of processes at geographical scales, it is important to understand how they connect to local scale processes.  Thus, I am interested in modeling population and community dynamics in a geographical context.  I am working with a variety of vertebrate organisms to model how population dynamics and abundance vary from one place to the next within their geographical ranges.  These focal questions, however, give rise to a number of different ancillary questions regarding such things as the ecological and evolutionary importance of body size, geographic patterns of species diversity, and resource use behavior.  Modeling ecological systems in space and time is a major tool that I use to answer questions about geographic scale ecological processes.  To this end, my lab uses a variety of quantitative and computational technologies. We intensively use geographical information systems (GIS) to analyze and model spatial processes.  Spatial statistics and related techniques from geostatistics provide the analytical framework for many of our statistical analyses.  Finally, use of nonlinear and spatially explicit mathematical modeling techniques allows us to develop theoretical approaches to large scale ecological systems.