Research Interests

I work at all levels in freshwater ecosystems, ranging from population and community ecology through to ecosystem and aquatic landscape ecology, including work on fish and invertebrates in streams, lakes and wetlands. I’ve been particularly interested in aquatic food webs, predator-prey interactions, the influences of flow-related habitat size and disturbance in rivers, exchanges between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and restoration and rehabilitation. This has included long-running studies in the upper Waimakariri River system in Canterbury, at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado and in agricultural streams of the Canterbury Plains. Important aspects include investigations of:
- effects of non-native trout on galaxiid fishes,
- riverscape configuration influences on fish and other aquatic biodiversity,
- changes in river habitat size (e.g. through alteration in flows) on river food webs,
- habitat drying on pond communities,
- connections between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems (cross-ecosystem influences)
-restoration of agricultural streams in the Canterbury Waterway Rehabilitation Experiment (CAREX).

See the FERG (Freshwater Ecology Research Group) pages for more details on this research and my EcologyLive website (see link under Resources above) for photographs, stories and information of interest to a wider audience.