One of my most active areas of research is an effort to integrate classic ecological modeling approaches with macroecology. By using standard consumer-resource models, it is remarkably straightforward to make quantitative predictions about the scaling of population density and energy use with body size. This allows us to discover the mechanisms that generate large-scale patterns such as Kleiber’s law and the Energetic Equivalence Rule. Future work will attempt to unravel other patterns such as species-area curves and diversity gradients.
Another primary area of research is the evolution of body size. Although some studies show that observed body sizes can maximize fitness, the reason why individuals grow to the size they do is unknown. This is especially obvious when considering the many unexplained body-size “rules”, including Cope's, Bergmann's, the island, and the temperature-size rule. Using a new model of body size optimization, I am attempting to understand rapid evolution and phenotypic plasticity of body size with respect to climate change, population dynamics, and eco-evolutionary dynamics
