"Math for an Imperiled World: Quantitative Ecology in the 21st Century"

In this talk, I will focus on how the interplay of math and ecology can address current issues in ecology.  Global change--broadly taken to include climate change, habitat degradation, pollution, overharvesting, and invasive species introduction--threatens nearly every ecosystem on Earth.  The tools to address these issues have become increasingly quantitative.  I will focus on three topics in global change biology: species' range shifts, invasive species management, and sustainable resource harvesting.  Within each topic, I will give an overview of the research I've been a part of, as well as future directions ways in which math may provide insight.  We will see that the mathematical tools used in ecology are as diverse as the ecological problems themselves--including integral equations, mathematical programming, and continuous-time Markov chains.