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
Mahdieh Tourani
Mahdieh 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 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 is interested in the ecology of a changing world, including how climate and land use change affect wildlife. Here, he combines field work and statistical modeling to better understand the link between avian communities and food safety.
Naresh Devarajan
Naresh’s interdisciplinary research focuses on elucidating how dynamics within microbial communities affect ecosystem processes, including foodborne disease suppression.
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.
Graduate Students
Alison Ke
Alison is fundamentally interested in how biodiversity is generated and maintained, and she applies this topic to biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes.
Katherine Lauck
Katherine is interested in the relationship between agriculture and adjacent tropical forests, and the role biodiversity plays in mediating their relationship under ongoing anthropogenic modification.
Cody Pham
Cody is broadly interested in how human activity influences wildlife, searching for solutions on how to conserving biodiversity and preserve human interests in the face of ongoing climate and land-use change.
Undergraduates
Thomas Phillips
Thomas is interested in the relationship between wildlife and agriculture and methods for making agroecosystems more hospitable for vulnerable animal species.
Katia Goldberg
Katia is interested in climate change in changing landscapes, with an emphasis on Mediterranean climates, and the adaptations Passerine birds are undergoing due to anthropogenic changes.
Kees Hood
Kees is interested in how human activities have impacted the environment over long timescales, and how this knowledge might be applied to conservation and restoration questions.
Alumni
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.