Current Research Areas
Our lab has a diverse set of research interests that span across space, time and taxa. Here are some key areas we are actively exploring.
Plant & Animal Phenology
Our work often leverages natural history collections data and community science data to address how plants and animals respond phenologically to global change. We develop methods and best practices and utilize those to address key questions about phenology responds across trophic levels. We have special interests in how urbanization impacts phenology, how extreme weather events shape phenology responses and in phenological mismatches between plants and insects.
Spatial Biodiversity
Our lab group has been very active in understanding patterns and processes that lead to current diversity. We have developed species distribution models at regional and global scales for multiple groups of animals and plants and combine these data with phylogenetic information to understand historical processes underlying current distributions.
Global Change
Much of our work focuses on global change and how to use field based approaches and natural history data to understand change rates. We have focused some work on urbanization impacts on insect diversity and other work on how climate change is impacting occupancy and abundance, with a focus on lepidopterans.
Macroevolutionary Processes
While our lab often is not directly involved in building phylogenies, we have a strong interest in using them to ask comparative questions, such as how traits evolve and how traits relate to diversification rates across the Tree of Life.
Community Science
Our lab group has strong interests in both building new community science tools and using community science data. We run our own citizen science project, Notes from Nature, which has been active for over 10 years. We also collaborate with iNaturalist, the National Phenology Network, and other projects, and actively work on understanding how people contribute to community science projects. In sum, community science sits very centrally in our lab research efforts.
Biodiversity Informatics & Natural History Collections
Our lab group has long been involved in biodiversity informatics efforts, from building new data standards for natural history collections, to mobilizing new forms of natural history collections data, to use of machine learning to help automate digitization and georeferencing tasks.
Our lab is very passionate about teaching, education and outreach.
Rob is also passionate about outreach to the broader community and has collaborated with the Soltis lab at UF to produce movies about biodiversity (treetender.org). Our lab also takes part in multiple education and outreach events at the Florida Museum.
Rob currently teaches courses in animals and human affairs, global change, species distribution modeling, and other graduate seminars. Rob also routinely works with interns and undergraduates to provide mentoring experience for students.
