Berry Brosi Postdoctoral Research Fellow
	bbrosi [at] stanford [dot] edu
	[Curriculum Vitae]

My research program is focused on how land use and management affect pollinator communities and animal-mediated pollination of crops and wild plants. I am addressing both basic and applied questions in pollination biology and landscape ecology using a spectrum of approaches including comparative and experimental field studies, population genetics, stable isotope studies, GIS and remote sensing, and mathematical modeling. My work is ultimately designed to enhance the stability and productivity of agricultural production and also to conserve pollinators, natural plant communities, and the intricate ecological interactions that bind them.

Current projects include:

Pollinator response to land-use change
Over the past five years, I have been working to better understand the drivers of bee diversity, abundance, and community composition in deforested countryside in southern Costa Rica with: a multi-year bee sampling effort; detailed, species-specific characterization of plant nectar and pollen resources; and GIS and remote sensing data.

Habitat-scale bee foraging using stable isotopes
I have been developing a system to distinguish the proportion of bee diets that come from forested vs. deforested habitats using stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen from bee tissues in collaboration with Page Chamberlain, Stanford Geology Department. We are particularly interested in how these coarse-scale foraging patterns change with landscape context, and in future applications for determining the importance of croplands for the diets of wild bees.

Integrating wild pollinator habitat into agricultural production systems
In collaboration with Paul Armsworth, University of Sheffield, UK, I have been developing a mathematical model to help farmers integrate native habitat (as a habitat “reservoir” for pollinating bees) in a spatially explicit manner into their agricultural production lands to maximize crop pollination.

Bee landscape genetics
With Sevan Suni of Stanford University, I am investigating how spatial patterns of deforestation and land-use affect the population genetics of Trigona fulviventris, a social stingless bee (Apidae: Meliponini) in southern Costa Rica.

Science and the US Endangered Species Act
In a collaborative effort with Eric Biber, Boalt Hall School of Law, UC-Berkeley, we are working to characterize the use and misuse of science and statistics in the context of the US Endangered Species Act.

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I am a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Conservation Biology and Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University. I completed my Ph.D. at Stanford in October 2006, where I was advised by Gretchen Daily.

I grew up in a small town in Kentucky, and graduated from Wesleyan University with degrees in art and biology. I earned an interdisciplinary Master of Environmental Science degree from Yale University, with thesis work on community forest management in Oaxaca, Mexico.

I have worked for The New York Botanical Garden, USGS-Biological Resources Division, Polygram Records, and as an environmental educator and rafting guide. I have conducted fieldwork on a range of taxa and systems in New England, Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, Hawaii, and Micronesia.

(updated September 2007)