I study ecological physiology and thermal adaptation to better understand the responses of organisms to changing environments. Specifically, I seek to explain landscape-level patterns of the abundances and distributions of animals by understanding the basic physiologies and behaviors of individuals within a spatial context. I especially enjoy operating at the interface of theory and empiricism in the areas of physiological and biophysical ecology, population and community dynamics, landscape ecology, and evolutionary ecology. To that end, I use an integrative and quantitative approach to address ecological problems by combining elements not only from physiology and behavior, but also from new techniques available from Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing, evolutionary programming, statistics, and computer science. Recent projects include: 1) building and testing a spatially-explicit theory of thermoregulation, 2) physiological and population responses to climate change for small vertebrate ectotherms, 3) thermally-mediated intraspecific competition in spatially-explicit environments, 4) optimal dispersal through thermally-structured habitats, 5) optimal coloration under thermoregulatory and predatory constraints, and 6) thermal dependence of chytrid fungus-frog interactions and amphibian decline
