conservation ecology

I am interested in widely exploring what impact humans have on the survival and diets of uncommon vertebrates. I have worked across all time scales using techniques such as stable isotope analysis to figure out what the remains of animals (bones, eggs, hair, tissue) can tell us about the environments they lived in and the food they ate. I am currently using stable isotopes, in conjunction with next-generation sequencing methods, to look at modern samples collected from wildlife non-invasively (scats and hair) to see what they can tell us about the diets of uncommon carnivores, such as big cats. Combining genetic and chemical methods, we can get an extremely clear picture of an organism's dietary ecology. This allows us to be able to compare diets between sympatic species and geographically separated populations. It is vital to understand how apex predators change their diets as their habitats become more urbanized so we can predict how food webs will change over time with increasing human ecological interference.