Dr Simon Hart
Researcher biography
The goal of our research is to understand the processes driving the rise and fall of populations of species within communities.
Our research has helped to quantify the influence of demographic stochasticity, individual variation, phenotypic plasticity, rapid evolution, and spatial environmental heterogeneity on population and community dynamics. We are also interested in the role of non-stationary environments, fluctuating environments, and 'extreme events' on dynamics and distributions.
We focus on the biology of flowing freshwater ecosystems — streams, rivers, and associated wetlands. These systems provide wonderfully challenging opportunities for combining theory, observations, and experiments to discover how nature works.
More importantly, freshwater ecosystems are, per unit area, the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet, and yet they remain underexplored, underappreciated, and under threat.
We hope our work can help to redress these issues.