One major focus of the lab is characterizing aquatic macroinvertebrate communities in wilderness streams of the central Arizona highlands. We seek to understand how different stream macrohabitats and other environmental variables influence these communities, allowing us to provide guidance for the conservation and protection of these wildernesses.

Aquatic habitats are among the most imperiled habitats in desert ecosystems, yet they harbor a disproportionately high amount of biodiversity given the small land area they cover. Aquatic invertebrates constitute a major part of this biodiversity and form a critical part of the food web that sustains aquatic, riparian, and terrestrial organisms. Biodiversity in dryland aquatic habitats is strongly influenced by spatial and temporal variability, which presents challenges for predicting how management decisions could affect landscape-scale patterns of aquatic invertebrate biodiversity. With funding from the Dept. of Defense, this project integrates mathematical modeling, invertebrate sampling, and statistical estimation to develop methodologies for tracking biodiversity of aquatic invertebrates on military lands across the southwestern US.