Understanding the rules of life is important for creating informed conservation plans that account for the ecological constraints of species. We work with individual species or groups to address targeted management needs and also at broader phylogenetic and spatial scales to answer overarching questions of invertebrate conservation. 

For targeted conservation studies, our goals change with the focal system to match the needs of stakeholders and funding agencies but the overall approach remains the same: incorporating genomic, environmental, and morphological data to get a comprehensive picture of population dynamics, distributional patterns, and associated eco-morphological associations of threatened species. Previous work in the lab has largely focused on one of the most threatened groups of continental North American land snails (Oreohelix) and we plan to continue to work with private and public conservation agencies for the management of this group. However, we are open to working on any system where our expertise overlaps with the needs of the system.

Many of the tools we utilize and develop seek to process and generate vast amounts of data to address the 'data gap' prevalent in invertebrate conservation. This work has largely focused on non-marine molluscs, on the of the most threatened groups on the planet with the greatest number of documented extinctions of any major group (Lydeard et al. 2004). Future work will expand to marine taxa and seek to determine whether similarities exist in conservation needs spanning the land-freshwater-saltwater boundaries.

Targeted Molluscan Conservation

Current projects: 2021-2022  USFWS Candidate Conservation Program Fund: "Species taxonomic evaluation, population structure, and distribution of FWS priority Oreohelix in Washington" in collaboration with Selkirk Wildlife Science.

Future projects: Open to North American freshwater and terrestrial mollusc systems (particularly limestone associates).

Broad patterns of threatened diversity

My collaborators and I are leveraging the image derived morphological attribute database I have developed to understand broad patterns of species status and ecological specialization. We seek to answer the questions of whether more heavily biomineralized species are more threatened in all North American land snails and across marine gastropods.