The Huntly Lab studies population and community ecology of Western landscapes, using a broad array of approaches, ranging from behavioural ecology to ecosystem dynamics, integrated through models of population biology and food webs.  We currently work in sage steppe landscapes and Alaskan coastal ecosystems. The central themes of our work are at the interfaces of biodiversity, long-term community dynamics, the spatial and temporal pattern in the environment (environmental variation), and food web structure. We CHANGE to use general theory and mechanistic models to understand how specific ecosystems work, as we view this approach as most likely to further understanding of Nature.  

Sage steppe provides an interesting theatre in which to study roles of spatial (e.g., habitat patches, some with long historical isolation and others produced by recent land use change; soil variation at a range of usually smaller spatial scales) and temporal (e.g., shorter and longer term patterns of weather and climate) environmental variation on population biology and community dynamics. Sage steppe is an extensive and economically significant western landscape that remains poorly understood, despite comprising historically some 450,00 ha of  the arid and semiarid Intermountain West.

Our work in Alaska has the understanding of people as components of biological communities and dynamic ecosystems as a central focus. We are part of a collaborative extended lab group that includes archaeologists, paleoclimatologists, geomorphologists, marine and terrestrial ecologists, and social/cultural anthropologists. We seek to build a fully integrated model of the Aleut and the North Atlantic/coastal tundra ecosystem of which they have been a part for millennia, and to make our understanding of this ecosystem relevant to ecological and cultural persistence of the Aleut  and other human societies.

Our lab offers opportunities for motivated students and collaborating scientists at  all levels, from high school to Ph.D., to participate in these two projects. Students interested in joining the lab should have interests in theory-driven studies of specific ecosystems, should be strongly motivated to develop their own research ideas as parts of larger collaborative studies, and should be inclined to both learn mathematics (statistics, experimental design, modeling, facility with analyzing and applying general theory) and conduct field work (both experimental and observational) on the ecology of communities within the landscapes of Western North America.