Environmental disturbances and biodiversity turnover in the Anthropocene increasingly threaten species interactions – the scaffolding of ecosystems. Plant and pollinator communities and their interactions provide ecosystem functions and services (i.e., pollination) that are biologically and economically critical. Species interactions are particularly vulnerable to environmental disturbances because each interacting group can be individually impacted with a resulting loss of the interaction. Importantly, environmental disturbances that threaten biodiversity rarely occur in isolation and, rather, occur in combination with regional and local scale effects. To protect ecosystem functions and services, and thus, the interactions between species, we must first collect a realistic understanding of the multiple stressors that can affect species, interactions, and ecosystem structure.

This dissertation takes an empirical approach to understanding plant and pollinator communities, investigating: (1) the relative effects of multiple environmental attributes on plant-pollinator network structure, (2) the relative effects of regional climate and species introduction across ecosystem boundaries on plant community diversity, and (3) the bottom-up or top-down effects of regional and local stressors on plant reproduction.

Through these studies, we find that the amount of available habitat and the quality of habitat is vital for the diversity of both plant and pollinator communities and the resulting complexity and frequency of their interactions. Importantly, habitat quality could be especially influential where resources are limited. These findings support the integration of habitat quality into conservation planning in order to mitigate the effects of multiple stressors on species interactions across landscapes. This work confirms conservation goals such as prioritizing habitat size in reserve planning, but also encourages a more comprehensive examination of the impacts of introduced species.

Analyzing French literature, travel photography and writing from the 1830s to 1860s, this dissertation, entitled Imagination, Mimesis, and Style: Nineteenth-Century French Realism, Travel Narratives and Photography, examines how Orientalism directly influenced the early realist and modernist works of Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Maxime Du Camp, and Charles Baudelaire. This dissertation underscores how the development of nineteenth-century realism and modernism is greatly indebted to French transcultural contact and overseas history and challenges the literary historical notion that realism and modernism were nationally bound genres. In the chapters that follow, considering the foreign or exotic beyond its role as providing ornamental diversity and diversion in European texts—and as actually participating in the development of form—this dissertation, in its methodology, departs from a nationalist understanding of nineteenth-century artistic and literary development. Responding to a current lacuna in recent research that privileges how Romanticism contributed to orientalist imagery, this study will show how what have been considered orientalist modes of approaching the world in travel documentation functioned not merely as an “other” to realistic and modern modes of representation, but rather that the construction of these modern forms of literary and visual representation was instrumental in making “realism” realist and “modernism” modern. The first two chapters focus on how Orientalism played a central role in Balzac’s and Flaubert’s first successful novels, La Peau de chagrin and Madame Bovary, respectively, while the third chapter concerns how Maxime Du Camp employed romantic travel tropes to realistically portray the Orient. If the first three chapters show how Orientalism informed realism, then the fourth chapter turns to the modernism of Baudelaire’s travel poetry in order to elaborate how post-romantic cultural expressions in France grappled with the same questions of representation and reference as posed by Orientalism in the nineteenth century.

A diverse range of biologically critical phenomena involve membrane remodeling and/or the induction of membrane curvature changes by peptides or proteins. These events require a complex interplay between biophysical properties of both lipids and proteins. In this dissertation, we examine several prototypical systems important to human health and disease: the action of antimicrobial peptides on bacterial membranes, of cell-penetrating peptides in drug delivery, of viral proteins in the entry and egress of enveloped viruses, of gamete proteins in fertilization, and of dynamin-related GTPases in mitochondrial fusion and fission. Examples of each of these processes will be engaged in detail by a chapter of the dissertation. In all of these cases, a peptide or protein precipitates topological changes that allow communication across a deformable membrane dividing two spaces, such as membrane pore formation, membrane blebbing, or membrane budding and scission. While the distinct deformations and changes to membrane morphology in these processes may differ, they generally result from combinations of simple, constitutive mechanisms of membrane curvature generation. These include (but are not limited to) membrane insertion, membrane scaffolding, curvature sensing, molecular crowding, and membrane wrapping. We show in each case how these different membrane curvature generation mechanisms coordinate to induce topological changes in membranes.