As curator of the Colorado Plateau Museum of Arthropod Biodiversity I am interested in documenting arthropod biodiversity across environmental gradients. The Museum specializes in developing regional arthropod biodiversity databases for the Colorado Plateau. One of my near-term goals is to develop distribution maps for key taxa that can be used in ArcGIS for spatial analyses relevant to conservation.

A major linkage between my areas of research is outbreaking insects; specifically the pinyon needle scale and the pinyon bark beetle, two key insect species in the interior western United States. Our work on these outbreaking species is focused on their impacts to their host plants, which in turn have ecosystem to landscape level impacts. I am very interested in scaling herbivore impacts from plots to regions. This involves the use of standard field ecology methodologies and GIS/Remote Sensing.
In the process of understanding the impacts of outbreaking insect herbivores I became interested in knowing the natural range of variability in dominant species like pinyon, which in turn mediate ecosystem-level processes. The Pinyon-Juniper woodland is especially interesting because of its historical increase and preponderance in the interior west. We still do not know why this woodland has increased so greatly since the arrival of Europeans. To what degree is woodland expansion due to human land-use patterns versus natural factors such as recovery from past droughts and ensuing insect outbreaks?

My teaching interests cover the fields of entomology and ecology. I currently teach Entomology (BIO322). My teaching opportunities are restricted because I have a research faculty appointment in the Department of Biological Sciences, and work full-time as the Director of the Merriam-Powell Center for Environmental Research. However, the Merriam-Powell Center promotes environmental research and associated education and outreach, and thus I have unlimited opportunities to interact with faculty and students in my areas of research and teaching interests. Additionally, the Colorado Plateau Museum of Arthropod Biodiversity supports research projects that focus on biodiversity http://bugs.bio.nau.edu. We also provide an informal education outreach program for k-12 schools that features arthropod natural history and conservation.