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 biodiversitySpecifically, I will be creating metacommunities that have different types of habitat heterogeneity between patches, based of age of the community, and biotic structure of the community, and watching the changes that take place in species compisition through time. 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 there can be a better basis for building models of biodiversity that include not just habitat heterogeneity as one factor, but possibly as many seperate factors, giving us a more precise way to monitor biodiversity in ecosystems.
