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Teaching: General Biology I, Biometry, Community Ecology. Research: Ecology of coastal communities, food web dynamics, insect ecology. Research in my lab centers on the ecology of coastal and upland communities such as salt marshes, wetlands, coastal dunes, and upland hammocks. I am primarily interested in how variation in environmental factors influences community dynamics such as plant and insect species diversity and abundance, and the relative importance of food sources versus predation and parasitism on herbivores. A main focus of my research has been investigating the influence of nitrogen availability and salinity levels on the interactions among plants, herbivorous insects and their predators in salt marshes. Changes in these fundamentally important, but highly variable, environmental factors influence both plants and animals in an astounding array of direct and indirect ways. For example, increasing levels of environmental stress in the form of salinity can have a negative direct effect on herbivores by decreasing food quality, but a positive indirect effect by decreasing frequency of attack by predators and parasites. The studies on coastal communities that my students and I conduct are important both theoretically and practically. We have applied our findings to evaluating current theories and models of community ecology, as well as to habitat restoration and species conservation. Current projects include examining the effects of elevated CO2 levels on a scrub oak forest ecosystem, investigating food web structure and species diversity in constructed wetlands, and studying the interplay between environmental stress levels and intraguild predation in salt marsh communities. Recent Publications: Moon, D.C. and P. Stiling. 2004. The relative importance of top-down and bottom-up forces in coastal versus upland tritrophic complexes. Ecology 85(11),in press. Moon, D.C. and P. Stiling. 2003. The influence of legacy effects and recovery from perturbations in a tritrophic salt marsh complex. Ecological Entomology 28:457-466. Stiling, P., D.C. Moon, M.D. Hunter, J.C. Colson, A.M. Rossi, G. Hymus, and B.G. Drake. 2002. Elevated CO2 lowers relative and absolute herbivore density across all species of a scrub oak forest. Oecologia 134:82-87. Moon, D. C. and P. Stiling. 2002. The Effects of herbivore feeding mode on top-down effects in a salt marsh ecosystem. Oecologia 133(2): 243-253. Moon, D. C. and P. Stiling. 2002. Top-down, bottom-up, or side to side? Within-trophic-level interactions modify trophic dynamics of a salt marsh herbivore. Oikos 98:480-490. Moon, D. C. and P. Stiling. 2002. The effects of salinity and nutrients on a tritrophic salt marsh system. Ecology 83(9): 2465-2476. |
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