Food webs, depictions of feeding relationships among organisms in an ecosystem, are one of the centralizing tenets in the field of ecology (see our review paper on the history of the field). I have approached the study of food webs from numerous conceptual and empirical perspectives, represented by the diversity of published papers on the Publications page.

I am especially interested in directly documenting the feeding roles of organisms within ecosystems using direct diet and stable isotope analysis.  I seek general patterns in food web structure, providing conceptual insights that transcend individual ecosystems. Food web approaches provide insight into some of the most pressing human-driven aspects of environmental change, including invasive species, habitat fragmentation, and fishery declines. We are also extending our models of food web structure to include the role of fishes as nutrient vectors.