One major focus of my lab in the near term will be to merge the original questions 1 and 2 to examine the role that social information plays in determining the relationship between biodiversity and ecosystem function. Specifically, we will measure the degree to which effects of social information on ecological function:
1) depend on the identity, stage, and state of focal individuals, as well as the density, diversity, and species composition of surrounding individuals that may differ extensively in their provision and use of social information
2) depend on environmental change, including human impacts (e.g., harvest, habitat loss, pollution, warming), and…
3) determine the function, dynamics and resilience of populations, communities, and ecosystems.
I am developing new empirical and quantitative approaches to test the context dependence of ecological effects of animal social interactions and the generality of their evolutionary origins. I recently developed a mobile multi-camera system that allows us to track landscape-scale behavior of individual fish across social contexts and to map this behavior onto high-resolution 3D models (generated using photogrammetry) of entire study areas. We are also using machine learning architectures to automate the precise reconstruction of movements and behaviors of individual fish in groups in situ. These advances in ‘Big Data’ collection at landscape scales will motivate statistical models and simulations that allow us to rigorously characterize, for the first time, socially-mediated functional roles of species and how these roles shift in space and time.
Furthermore, I am developing evolutionary models to measure the generality of ecological effects of social information by identifying environmental contexts that select for social facilitation and its density dependence. My lab will use this modeling framework and meta-analysic methods to investigate the role of social facilitation in shaping and maintaining diversity, and, concordantly, we will measure the effect of phylogeny on the frequency and nature of social interactions in the wild.
In addition, our lab will build on previous and ongoing collaborative works on the somewhat tangential but nonetheless fascinating topic of marine plastic pollution (see Gil and Pfaller 2016, Pfaller and Gil 2016, Pfaller et al. 2020) to develop new empirical experiments and quantitative models to understand the ecological consequence thereof.
I am excited to collaborate with and mentor graduate and undergraduate students and postdocs in theoretical and empirical research. Our lab will address basic research questions with clear management links in coral reefs and in other systems (including those in Colorado). If you’re interested in graduate school, and some/all of this sounds exciting, learn more about how to join the Gil Lab here.
Gil Lab 