Understanding how organisms interact with, and are limited by, their environment is a central question of ecology. Correlative species distribution models (SDM) can be used to project the expected past, current, or future geographic distributions of a species based on the environmental conditions where they are known to occur. I am particularly interested in leveraging big data approaches to understand and identify animal migration at the population level given shifts in seasonal distributions.

Animal tissues reflect the components synthesized during their formation-- put another way, you are what you eat. Analyzing the stable isotope ratios of inert tissues like fur can reveal key insights about the past conditions under which they were synthesized, yielding information about the geographic origin and diet of an animal when the tissue was formed. I leverage stable hydrogen analysis of animal tissues with a particular interest in studying broad-scale migratory strategy, and have developed and validated new techniques to help scale our understanding from individual to population-level movements.

Campbell, C. J.; Fitzpatrick, M.C.; Vander Zanden, H.; Nelson, D. M. 2020. Advancing interpretation of stable isotope assignment maps: comparing and summarizing origins of known-provenance migratory bats. Animal Migration. [link]

Integrating data across multiple scales and sources allows us to examine ecological hypotheses at the broadest possible spatial and taxonomic scales.

I leverage data integration on a diversity of projects; for example, I have applied a data synthesis approach to integrate stable hydrogen isotope data across varying analytical laboratories and standard reference scales. Keep an eye out for another forthcoming publication where I leverage data synthesis techniques to leverage historical records to explore wildlife disease transmission risks!

I am passionate about developing open-source software to promote accessible and reproducible science.

Maintainer
SDMetrics: Metric to Compare Temporally-Explicit Species Distribution Models. 2022.
Development: https://github.com/cjcampbell/SDMetrics

isocat: Isotope Origin Clustering and Assignment Tools. 2018.
Release: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=isocat
Development: https://github.com/cjcampbell/isocat

Contributor
phenesse: Estimate Phenological Metrics using Presence-Only Data. 2019.
Release: https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=phenesse
Development: https://github.com/mbelitz/phenesse