Community assembly across environmental change

Microbial communities are extraordinarily diverse, but ecosystem function depends on only a subset of the organisms and metabolic capacities present at any given time. My research asks how environmental history, dispersal, disturbance, and species interactions determine which communities assemble, which persist, and whether independent communities converge on similar ecological functions.

I use mangrove sediments and other coastal microbial ecosystems as natural experiments because they combine strong environmental gradients with disturbance and restoration. By integrating genome-resolved metagenomics, comparative community analyses, and ecological theory, we test whether recovery requires the return of the original taxa or can emerge through alternative community configurations that rebuild equivalent functional capacities.

This work provides the ecological foundation for a broader goal: identifying general and testable rules that explain when microbial community assembly is deterministic, when it is historically contingent, and how those trajectories shape ecosystem recovery.