Assistant Professor

Education  

PhD, University of Tennessee
BA, University of Oxford

Areas of Research

My research is driven in large part by an intense interest in how complex ecological systems work. This interest manifests itself in a variety of specific research activities.

One such activity involves the colonial wading birds of south Florida, and of Everglades National Park in particular. There are two main themes. One is analysis of the wading bird distribution data collected by the systematic reconnaissance flights (SRF). My coauthors and I have published one paper on this, and I am currently seeking funding to extend this work to predictive models of the response of various wading bird species in the Park to alternative water management scenarios.

Another interest is information-based statistics in ecology, likelihood and Bayesian methods for estimating survivorship and related curves, small-world and other network models as they apply to ecological systems.

Selected Publications

Ferraz, G., Russell, G.J., Lovejoy, T.E., Stouffer, P.C., Bierregaard, R.O., & Pimm, S.L. (2004).  "Rates of species loss from Amazonian forest fragments,"  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 24, 14069–14073.

Russell, G.J., Bass, O.L., Pimm, S.L. (2002).  "The effects of hydrological patterns and untimely, breeding-season flooding on the numbers and distribution of wading birds in Everglades National Park," Animal Conservation, 5, 185-199.

Lockwood, J.L., Russell, G.J., Gittleman, J.L., Daehler, M.L., McKinney, M.L., Purvis,A. (2002). A metric for analyzing taxonomic patterns of extinction risk," Conservation Biology, 16, 1137-1142.