Project
Higher-Order Interactions for Synthesizing Trophic and Non-Trophic EcologyEcologists study interactions between species, other species, and their environment. Normally we assume that interactions are always between two species, or one species and the environment, but this doesn't exactly reflect reality. We can divide ecological interactions into two major groups: those that result in the movement of biomass like predator-prey relationships or migrations, and interactions that don't move biomass, like pollination or prey behaving differently to avoid predators. This second group of interactions can only affect a population of some species via modifying one of those interactions which does move biomass. When this happens, the interaction involves more than two species: predator and prey (for example) and the species which modifies this relationship. This breaks our assumption that interactions are always between two species. Representing this situation mathematically requires new tools which ecologists don't currently use. Right now, we use a mathematical tool called a network to represent and study large collections of ecological interactions. To accommodate interactions of many species we have to move to a related tool called a hypergraph. My work focuses on integrating hypergraphs into ecology and creating software to help us do analyzes using them.
