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Fall 2016
Western North American landscapes are rapidly being transformed by forest die- off caused by mountain pine beetle with implications for plant and soil communities. The mechanisms that drive changes in plant and soil community structure and function, particularly for understory vegetation and the...
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Disentangling competitive processes to better understand their drivers and consequences in a native grassland community
DownloadSpring 2021
Competition is often highlighted as a major force influencing community structure. However, there are multiple facets of competition that may have independent and differential impacts, making the understanding of what drives competition and how it structures communities difficult. In this thesis,...
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Spring 2014
The worldwide biodiversity crisis has intensified the need to better understand how biodiversity and human disturbance are related. Yet this relationship lacks both consensus in theoretical expectations and consistency in observed empirical patterns. I present one of the largest extent studies...
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Spring 2013
The Rocky Mountain apollo butterfly, Parnassius smintheus, and its host-plant Sedum lanceolatum, are endemic to open alpine meadows threatened by the encroachment of trees. I explore variability in interactions between P. smintheus and S. lanceolatum relative to the treeline-delimited meadow...
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Responses in butterflies to loss and fragmentation of boreal forests from in situ oil sands
DownloadSpring 2019
Anthropogenic loss and fragmentation of habitat are a threat to biodiversity, while increasing demands for energy have made the provision of fossil fuels an important source of disturbance to habitats around the globe. In Alberta, Canada, the extraction of a 142,000 km2 oil sands reserve is...
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Fall 2017
Multiple novel and rapidly changing environmental factors (i.e. anthropogenic stressors) are increasingly affecting ecological communities, and their functional roles in ecosystems. Consequently, freshwater biodiversity has declined worldwide; however, the functional impacts of this loss should...