In Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park as well as protected and agricultural lands in California, we use DNA metabarcoding to study what animals eat. This means we handle a lot of poop, which is the raw material from which we can extract DNA and reconstruct diets. Primarily, we focus on ungulate herbivores (from zebra to deer to cattle) and the intricacies of their plant diets. A core question across this research is: what are the aspects of plant chemistry that herbivores use to select foods and how do those indicators relate to individual nutritional condition? Ultimately, our aim is to develop and validate predictive models of herbivore foraging behavior that can guide population management. 

At higher trophic levels, we ask how predators weigh availability, reward, and risk during prey selection. Based in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, we are studying how predator diets adapt to novel environments and are influenced by sociality and group culture.

Southern Ground Hornbills (Bucorvus leadbeateri ) are a cooperatively breeding, long-lived bird from Southern Africa. Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park is home to one of the most dense populations in the world. Fiercely territorial, high population density leads to tighter spatial packing of social groups. Our work aims to understand the mechanisms supporting high population density in Gorongosa and the behavioral consequences of high-density living.

We are exploring multiple angles of ground hornbill sociality and behavior in Gorongosa from the social coordination in their foraging marches and play to their diverse foraging and territorial behaviors. We aim to uncover aspects of ground hornbill biology that both further our understanding of the species and contribute to success reintroduction design elsewhere in its range.

Linking foraging behavior with individual- and population-level consequences relies on our ability to accurately measure an individual’s body mass and condition. For large animals, like ungulates, this has often required invasive or destructive sampling methods.

In collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Amherst, we are developing a platform for automated measurement of body mass and size in large animals. This platform will allow scientists and ecosystem managers to track body condition non-invasively across populations in real time and also provide data on population age structure and overall health.

Large herbivores must navigate dramatic changes in quality and availability of plant foods as seasons shift from summer to winter or wet to dry. Using fine-scale temporal sampling of diet composition across entire communities of herbivores, we are investigating how dietary-niche overlap among species changes with the seasons. Alongside collaborators at Wake Forest University and in The Netherlands, we also study how the seasonal wildebeest migration in the Serengeti alters niche overlap among non-migratory species and based on the water dependence of those species.

Mouth morphology shapes how herbivores feed and which plants can most profitably be selected. Studying the unchecked growth of Gorongosa’s waterbuck population, we are testing whether intraspecific variation in mouth architecture leads to divergence in diet composition and foraging habits within the population. 

Through the sheer size of their appetites, large herbivores have inordinate impacts on the ecosystems they are part of. We are studying how their presence alters ecosystem-wide processes. In previous work, we showed (alongside collaborators at the University of Florida) that the presence of large herbivores greatly diminishes floral resources for pollinators. 

Our current work explores the impact of large herbivores on ecosystem-wide plant productivity and the additional impacts of their dung deposition on the broader community.