Anthropogenic disassembly of mammal communities past and present

Understanding the relative importance of the processes driving the assembly and disassembly of ecological communities is important for basic and applied ecology. In this talk, I will focus on the role of humans in community disassembly. Specifically, I will address historical human impacts on mammal food webs as well as contemporary human impacts on protected tropical mammals. I will show how mammal food webs around the world collapsed following human colonization with range contractions and ongoing threats further impacting them. Secondly, using standardized camera trap data from protected areas throughout the tropics, I will show how humans are currently affecting protected tropical forest mammals even though protected areas are our most critical places for wildlife conservation. In addition to efforts to conserve 30% of land area by 2030, ensuring the effective management of existing protected areas to conserve threatened species facing human pressure is both critical and urgent.

About Lydia: As a community and macroecologist, I am particularly interested in the assembly and disassembly of ecological communities over space and time. My research group studies the relative influences of historical, environmental and anthropogenic conditions on multiple aspects of community structure, such as occupancy, functional diversity, and food webs. We conduct large scale comparisons of community composition within and among biogeographic regions as well as local scale research from observational field work. Most of our work focus on tropical forest mammal communities. I earned my PhD in Ecology at UC Davis before working as a postdoc at Conservation International for the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring Network (TEAM). I was then a member of the Michigan Society of Fellows in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. After several years as a faculty member at Rice University, I recently joined the Integrative Biology faculty at Michigan State University where I am also a core faculty member in the Program in Ecology, Evolution & Behavior.