Lauren C. Ponisio
My research program focuses on understanding the mechanisms by which species interactions maintain species diversity, and how we can harness these processes to manage and restore diversity in human-modified systems. I focus on pollinators because they are critical for pollination in managed and natural plant communities, but my research is broadly applicable across ecological interactions.
My aim is to discover new insights into how communities form, evolve, and persist through time and space, aiding in the prediction and prevention of community collapse. I combine modeling, synthesis and field-based work, and adhere to the principles of reproducible, open science. |
In addition, my personal connection to issues concerning agriculture sustainability as a native of the Central Valley and Latina woman has motivated me to study how to design agricultural systems to better support humans and wildlife. I have investigated strategies for designing agricultural systems to promote biodiversity conservation and the links between conservation strategies and improving livelihoods. Beyond promoting biological diversity, my second mission in life is to increase human diversity in the sciences. Because people draw upon their life experiences to inform their science, a diversity of backgrounds is necessary to promote the advancement of science. |
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Hamutahl Cohen
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Post-doctoral scholar
Hamutahl received her Ph.D. at UC Santa Cruz in Environmental Studies. Her research is motivated by the fact that bees are dying. Bees pollinate important crops in California’s farms and gardens, and agricultural landscapes, in turn, provision resources for bees: pollen and nectar for food and materials and ground substrate for nesting habitat. Through resource provisioning, landscape context impacts bee health: those bees with access to food and habitat are healthier. But landscape context also has epidemiological importance for bees. As a bee forages across landscapes for food, it acquires pollen and nectar-vectored beneficial and pathogenic microorganisms. Her research therefore addresses how variation in floral resources influences bee health. She works in both urban and rural systems with wild and domesticated bees to assess how management and landscape context influence bee-microbe and bee-pathogen interactions. She relies on a combination of field experiments and molecular techniques and to conduct research. In the Ponisio lab she is learning how to apply ecological network analyses to understand the distribution of parasites in wild bees and how this is impacted by both functional traits of different bee species but also by habitat management. |
Contact:
hamutahlc@gmail.com 
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Jennie Durant
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Post-doctoral scholar
Jennie is a social scientist interested in agrifood systems, with a focus on transitions to diversified farming and socially just food production. Jennie received her PhD at University of California, Berkeley in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, and an M.F.A. in nonfiction from Saint Mary’s College of California. Her cross-disciplinary research focuses on agrifood systems at national and global scales, and draws from geography, rural sociology, and environmental science. Jennie’s current and past research contributes to debates on drivers behind pollinator vulnerability. Her PhD research investigated how commercial beekeepers changed their management practices as the California almond industry–most commercial beekeepers’ primary source of pollination revenue–expanded three-fold from 1990-2016. Her methods included in-depth interviews, surveys, and participant observation, as well as analysis of historical documents and agricultural statistics. In the Ponisio Lab, Jennie is deepening her focus on the almond industry, a bee-dependent crop, by investigating the barriers and incentives to adopting bee-friendly practices on almond orchards through qualitative research and an industry-wide survey. |
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Gordon Smith
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Post-doctoral scholar
I study the causes and consequences of within-species variation in pollinator behavior. Behavior is one of the most plastic and variable responses organisms have to their environment, and differences in an individual's behavior can have large fitness consequences both for that individual and for other species it interacts with. This is especially true in plant-pollinator interactions, as plants rely heavily on mutualistic pollen vectors to reproduce. My research focuses on a number of questions: 1) How much do pollinator individuals vary in their foraging behavior? 2) How this variation is distributed over space and time? 3) What are the drivers underlying this variation? and 4) How does this variation influence the outcomes of these interactions? |
Jocelyn Zorn
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Contact: jocelynz at uoregon
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Collaborators |
Rob Straser
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Rob is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in the Dept. of Entomology at UCR working with Asst. Coop. Extension Specialist, Dr. Houston Wilson. Rob’s current research interests focus on understanding where and under what conditions alternative management strategies in agriculture, such as on-farm habitat diversification initiatives, have the potential to promote the long-term viability of natural enemy populations to benefit both crop yield and financial return on investment.
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Contact:
rstra005@ucr.edu |
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Lab alumni |
