Principal Investigator

Daniel Karp

Daniel’s research interests center on developing innovative methods for harmonizing food production with the conservation of ecosystem services and biodiversity. His work thus focuses on developing innovative solutions for reconciling conservation activities with food production practices.

Postdocs

Anne DiPaola

Anna studies how farmers can modify plant diversity to support pest regulation and crop yields. She works with organic lettuce growers to optimize the pest regulation services emerging from their stewardship of beneficial insect habitat (flowering strips, intercropped flowers, and woody hedgerows). Her work characterizes arthropod community composition, arthropod dispersal, and the landscape factors that influence pest regulation in these diversified production systems.

Graduate Students

Emily Mensch

Emily is interested in applied solutions to complex ecological problems in aquatic ecosystems. She uses a variety of ecological methods to investigate interactions between birds and fish in agricultural systems and how this affects biodiversity and agricultural productivity.

 

 

 

John Veon

John is interested in using fundamental ecological theory to solve applied issues in wetland ecosystems and among waterfowl species, all while working in close collaboration with private landowners, nonprofit organizations, and state and federal conservation agencies. His work focuses on understanding the mechanisms that drive ecological relationships within wetlands among rural to urban gradients in order to develop innovative and sustainable solutions for human-wildlife conflicts.

Karen Gallardo Cruz

Karen is interested in anthropogenic impacts on animal behavior and ecosystem function. She’s particularly interested in studying the effects of noise on trophic interactions.

 

 

 

Julian Tattoni

Julian studies the effects of anthropogenic stressors like climate change and urbanization on avian phenology and its consequences for conservation.   

 

 

 

Project Scientists

Jason Riggio

Jason’s research focuses on applied solutions to wildlife and landscape conservation challenges and is particularly driven to address human impacts on biodiversity at the intersection of species distributions and global change.

 

Alumni

Postdocs

Elissa Olimpi

Elissa was a postdoctoral scholar in the Karp Lab from 2017-2020. Her research is situated at the interface of conservation and agriculture and strives to understand how production landscapes can support biodiversity and benefit from the services provided by intact, ecological communities.

 

Daniel Paredes

Daniel was a postdoctoral scholar in the Karp Lab from 2019-2021. His research is focused on sustainable agriculture and how local and landscape management can help optimize the delivery ecosystem services to better balance biodiversity conservation and agricultural production.

 

Naresh Devarajan

Naresh was a postdoctoral scholar in the Karp Lab from 2020-2021 and then a project science from 2021-2022. Naresh’s interdisciplinary research focuses on elucidating how dynamics within microbial communities affect ecosystem processes, including foodborne disease suppression.

 

Mahdieh Tourani

Mahdieh was a postdoc in the Karp Lab from 2020-2022. She combines hierarchical analytical models and non-invasive monitoring data to address applied ecological questions relevant to species conservation and management. Her main interest is to develop models to overcome challenges associated with wildlife population monitoring at large scale, such as data sparsity and imperfect observations.

Sara Emery

Sara was a postdoc in the Karp lab from 2021-2023. She  is interested in using long-term data of agricultural pests to identify broad ecological patterns in response to climate and land-use change.

 

 

Austin Spence

Austin was a postdoctoral scholar in the Karp Lab from 2022-2025. His work focused on the ecology of a changing world, including how climate and land use change affect wildlife. In the Karp lab, he combined field work and statistical modeling to better understand the link between avian communities and food safety.

 

 

Graduate Students

Alison Ke

Alison was a graduate student in the Karp lab from 2017-2022. Her work focused on how biodiversity was generated and maintained; she applied this topic to biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes throughout the tropics. 

 

Katherine Lauck

Katherine was a graduate student in the Karp lab from 2019-2025.  Their work focused the interactive effects of heat and land-use change on avian physiology and reproduction, from local to continental scales.