Andrew

My research focuses on quantifying the ways human disturbances influence the dynamics of coral reefs globally. Identifying environments that bolster coral-reef resilience, where these environments occur, and what conditions cause coral reefs to lose resilience and collapse is crucial to identifying refugial locations to prioritize for conservation. Historically, our understanding of complex dynamics in marine ecosystems and the impacts of humans on these processes has been constrained to local scales for budgetary and logistical reasons. Yet, human disturbances occur across a variety of spatiotemporal scales. By utilizing large spatio-temporal datasets and state-of-the-art modeling techniques, I quantify previously unseen relationships between the environment and human disturbances and the dynamics of coral reefs, bridging the gap between theory and observation and shedding light on the resilience of coral reefs.