UC Santa Cruz

The era in which we now live has been called the anthropocene (Steffen et al. 2007), suggesting that humans have become such a global force that we fundamentally alter global ecological interactions, the carbon and nitrogen cycles (Gruber and Galloway 2008), the ecology of infectious diseases (Daszak et al. 2000), and our own climate. Such anthropogenic disturbance is often seen as an external perturbation rather than as a part of ecological systems. I take the alternate view that humans are just another strongly interacting component within the larger community of species. By putting humans back into community ecology, I explore the impacts of human predation on wildlife, and the consequences of predator community restructuring on human disease.

In some cases, management actions informed by science can mitigate or reverse negative anthropogenic environmental impacts. For example, the scientific discovery of the ozone hole (Solomon 1988) led to international action to regulate ozone depleting chemicals. It is my goal as a scientist to provide fundamental ecological insight that can inform management. As a result, this work is broken into three policy-relevant research themes. The first research theme quantifies the impact of varying levels of human predation of pacific salmon on ecosystems. The second theme addresses how changes in predator communities influenced the emergence of Lyme disease and other tick-borne pathogens that `prey' on humans. The third research theme addresses the need to understand the impact of human predation on large primates in tropical forests.