cfield
Main profile
My research is primarily focused on coastal ecology and conservation in the face of sea-level rise, with an emphasis on tidal marsh ecosystems. In addition to research, I have worked as a conservation practitioner at a national non-profit. My experiences working on the front lines of conservation have steered my research interests toward addressing questions that have the greatest chance of informing ongoing conservation activities. I am increasingly using interdisciplinary research to better address the complexity and trade-offs associated with real-world conservation issues. A common theme of my past and present research projects is better understanding and evaluating the quantitative methods we use to make inferences about ecological patterns and processes. I am especially interested in computational and Bayesian methods. At SESYNC, I will be investigating how computational methods can be used to develop integrative models that explicitly incorporate the social, physical, ecological, and evolutionary factors that drive ecosystem change. I will these models to address pressing questions about the future of tidal marshes, especially the possibility of near-term extinction for endemic tidal marsh birds, and the potential for landward migration to offset marsh losses from sea-level rise.
Selected publications
Field CR, Dayer AA, Elphick CS. 2017.
Landowner behavior can determine the success of conservation strategies
for ecosystem migration under sea-level rise.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in press.
Field CR, Bayard T, Gjerdrum C, Hill J, Meiman S, Elphick CS. 2017.
High-resolution tide projections reveal extinction threshold in response to sea-level rise.
Global Change Biology, in press.
Field CR et al. 2017.
Quantifying the importance of geographic replication and representativeness when estimating demographic rates.
Ecography, in press.
Field CR, Gjerdrum C, Elphick CS. 2016.
Forest resistance to sea-level rise prevents landward migration of tidal marsh.
Biological Conservation 201:363-369.
Field CR, Gjerdrum C, Elphick CS. 2016.
Choice of statistical method to adjust counts for imperfect detection has little effect on inferences about animal abundance.
Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
Cohort: 2017
| Resources | |
|---|---|
| High uncertainty over the future of tidal marsh birds under current sea-level rise projections |
Jan 04, 2021 Article published in Biodiversity and Conservation. |
| Quantifying the return on investment of social and ecological data for conservation planning |
Dec 19, 2019 Article published in Environmental Research Letters. |
| Framework for quantifying population responses to disturbance reveals that coastal birds are highly resilient to hurricanes |
Sep 15, 2019 Article published in Ecology Letters |
| The Polar Bear of the Salt Marsh? |
Oct 25, 2018 Case Study published by the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science. |
| Consequences of breeding system for body condition and survival throughout the annual cycle of tidal marsh sparrows |
Feb 08, 2018 Article published in Journal of Avian Biology. |