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Chris Searcy

Degrees:

Publications:

Research:

I am primarily interested in how communities are structured both within and between trophic levels, with the added goal of applying this research to conservation. My thesis project looks at relationships between trophic levels by removing predatory California tiger salamanders from pools with different biodiversities and from the surrounding terrestrial habitat. By monitoring the populations of other community members, I can determine the magnitudes of the responses to these predator removals in order to see whether higher biodiversity buffers the community against this disturbance and whether the resulting trophic cascades are stronger in the terrestrial or aquatic environments. A positive relationship between diversity and stability would be a strong argument for conserving all of the species within a community.

Another of my projects looks at patterns of trait evolution in order to detect traits that are evolving according to the niche-filling model. Such traits are characterized by decreasing rates of evolution, as the possibilities for trait change become smaller as niche space becomes progressively more crowded. These traits have been important in competitive interactions throughout the histories of their associated clades, and are thus important in structuring communities at the guild level.

Some of my other projects with a more clearly applied aspect deal with landscape ecology of vernal pools creatures. I have been using a pitfall trap array to monitor the habitat use of California tiger salamanders in order to determine parameters that characterize better salamander habitat. This higher quality habitat can then be given a higher conservation priority or mitigation value, in order to increase the survival probabilities of the species. I have also begun a wider survey of vernal pools across California in order to determine abiotic factors that are associated with more diverse pools so that such pools can be easily identified and again be given higher conservation priority. This survey should also provide information on how vernal pool communities are structured, since it will provide correlations between the abundances of different species.

My final project deals with ecological niche modeling. I have created multiple niche models for California tiger salamanders in MAXENT using nested subsets of the available locality data. The question is whether the best niche model is created by using all locality data or only data from the vicinity of the region that one is interested in. I will determine the answer by surveying sets of ponds that are differentially predicted by the different models to then test which model best matches the actual species distribution.