A Web of Maybes: Building and Using Co-occurrence Networks for Ecological Monitoring
When is a stream healthy, and how likely is it to remain so? There is a growing need to monitor the health of stream ecosystems, and yet these questions still have ill-defined answers. This talk will focus on one potential way forward using ideas from network theory to try and develop a general set of tools for describing how ecosystems respond to stress, and predicting if they are resilient in the face of future stress.
When: 1:30-3pm Saturday May 18th.
Where: CRASH Space. 10526 Venice Blvd, Culver City, CA 90232
About the speaker:
Before embarking on his current career of ecology and aquaculture research, Levi majored in physics at the Illinois Institute of Technology and science education at the University of California-Irvine, subsequently working as a high school science teacher in the Los Angeles area and a lecturer at Loyola Marymount University. Over the years he and his students have been involved in projects ranging from the design of insect traps to monitoring nuclear fallout from the Fukushima meltdown and building a distributed cosmic-ray detector array using cellphone cameras. He currently lives with his wife in Koreatown and draws daily inspiration from watching his cats sleep while leaving for work. Currently, he has been involved in the following projects as a graduate student:
1. Development of probiotic strains for use in shellfish aquaculture.
2. Developing novel ecological indices for the assessment of stream health.
3. Studying the influence of light pollution on coastal ecosystems in southern California.
4. Analyzing the landscape ecology of California from environmental DNA samples
