Sara Emery

I’m an applied ecologist, with interests in agricultural entomology, biological control, integrated pest management and community ecology.  I use a broad array of research methods, including large-scale field surveys, cage and lab experimentation, statistical ecology methods applied to large data sets (“big data”), and molecular methods to assess trophic links in agricultural insect communities. My goals are to mitigate negative effects of pests in agriculture and enhance the resilience of agricultural food production systems.

I seek to understand how arthropod communities are affected by the interacting drivers of climate and land-use change. Climate change and land-use intensification have been shown to alter population phenology, decrease biodiversity and homogenize ecological communities. Agriculture is one of the main drivers of land-use change and is less buffered against the impacts of climate change than many natural habitats. Arthropods in agricultural habitats represent an important model system to assess the cascading effects of these interacting stressors. I aim to provide growers with practical tools to predict pest population patterns, explore the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem service provisioning, and enhance the resilience of agricultural food production systems in a changing environment.

My work integrates (i) big data approaches with (ii) field-based validation and (iii) ecological theory to study the drivers of ecosystem service provisioning and pest population stability in arthropod communities in agricultural habitats. As an entomologist and ecologist interested in complex community structure and dynamics. I focus on landscape-level and climate change directed questions. In a time of rapid climate and land-use change, I develop tools that take advantage of temporally and spatially resolved pest and predator data and greater computing power to disentangle the drivers of pest population variability, arthropod community resilience to perturbations and the provisioning of ecosystem services. My research increases mechanistic ecological knowledge with an aim to tackle complex research questions to provide practical management tools for growers.