I earned a B.S. in physics from Columbia University in 1994, spent sometime as a computer programmer for a financial information firm, and then earned an M.S. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999. I am currently enrolled in a PhD program in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley, and working with advisor John Harte on research in ecology. Broadly, I hope to use my training in math and physics to help build a more quantitative theoretical framework for this field. Specifically, I have been focusing on a spatial biodiversity pattern known as the species-area relationship and its connection with other diversity patterns such as turnover, an endemics-area relationship, and an abundance distribution. The average number of species in an area of a certain size is often seen to depend on the area size according to a power-law, indicating a type of self-similarity or scale-invariance. This self-similarity property can be used to make predictions about other biodiversity patterns. My most recent work includes an expression relating species-level self-similarity (which leads to a power-law box-counting-range-area relationship) to the community-level self-similarity exhibited in a power-law species-area relationship. This expression indicates that community-level self-similarity does not lead from species-level self-similarity unless the exponent of the range-area relationship are the is the same for all species. I have also recently examined the clustering characteristics of species that are destributed self-similarly.

Home page: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~aostling