June 26th, 2009 Posted in General
Hi everyone! My name is Charlotte Heron, and I am a student at the University of Texas at Austin majoring in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior. This summer and fall I will be working with Dr. Pablo Munguia studying benthic community ecology and the mechanisms that drive biodiversity. Specifically, I will be creating metacommunities that have different types of habitat heterogeneity between patches, based on the age and structure of the community, and watching the changes that take place in species composition through time. Further, we will be looking at how the individual species perceive different types of heterogeneity, and the changes this causes to their distribution strategies. There will be lots of boat trips to the surrounding bays to anchor PVC into the mud to give these marine invertebrates a hard substrate on which to build their communities. Hopefully, there will be a visible difference between the effects of age heterogeneity and structural herterogeneity, so that future scientists may have a more thorough basis of understanding for building models of biodiversity that include not just habitat heterogeneity as one factor, but as many seperate factors, giving us a more precise way to monitor biodiversity in ecosystems.
