Shannon McCauley

Post Doctoral Research Fellow

 

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Area of Research:
My research addresses how local and regional processes each contribute to the structure of aquatic communities and how these processes may interact through the traits of individuals and species. I have worked principally with dragonflies which are a remarkably tractable system in which to ask questions about how processes operating at local scales (e.g., predation) and regional scales (dispersal) act, and interact, to structure species’ distributions across habitats gradients. Currently, I am examining how local and regional processes are linked through individual traits. Local conditions can affect the development of individual traits that in turn may influence the propensity and capacity individuals have to disperse. The goal of this work is to improve our understanding of how local habitat conditions affect the development of regional connectivity. I have also worked on morphological and behavioral plasticity in odonate larvae and am interested in the evolution of plasticity and the consequences of plasticity for species distributions.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Center for Population Biology at the University of California, Davis.

1. McCauley S.J. The role of local and regional processes in structuring larval dragonfly distributions across habitat gradients. Oikos 116 (1): 121-133.
2. McCauley, S.J. The effects of dispersal and recruitment limitation on community structure of odonates in artificial ponds. Ecography, 29(4): 585-595.
3. McCauley, S.J. 2005. Relationship between habitat distribution, growth rate, and plasticity in congeneric larval dragonflies. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 83: 1128-1133.
4. McCauley, S.J. 2005. Differential dispersal propensities between individuals in male Leucorrhinia intacta (Hagen). International Journal of Odonatology, 8(2): 223-232.
5. McCauley, S. J., S.S. Bouchard, B.J. Farina, K. Isvaran, S. Quader, D. W. Wood, C. M. St. Mary. 2000. Energetic dynamics and anuran breeding phenology: insights from a dynamic game. Behavioral Ecology, 11(4): 429-436.