Welcome to the Bahlai Lab at Kent State University!
We focus on developing tools and metrics for better understanding the functional ecology of communities over time. We combine computational approaches and collaborations with field ecologists to solve the problems we face in managing working ecosystems, invasive species, and restored landscapes. We’re interested in questions of scale- specifically, understanding long-term and broad spatial scale processes in ecosystems- and linking biodiversity metrics to ecosystem function at these scales.
We’re also interested in data science, data management, and making science a better, more collaborative place with technology and the open web.
ATTENTION: Statement on Anti-Black Racism and Police Brutality
Dr. Bahlai is available on a very limited basis for statistical/data/coding consults. Please see her booking policy here.
Dr. Bahlai is generally unable to provide interviews to individual students or teachers for school projects due to scheduling constraints. Please see her explanation here.
Major Areas of Research
1. Examining how human factors in data collection (e.g. study length, sampling methodology) impact the biodiversity monitoring and information trade-offs of various monitoring approaches
2. Understanding the diversity and functional relationships in insect communities, developing metrics to quantify these relationships, and understanding how they are altered by disturbances (landscape management, climate change, etc.)
3. Developing break-point analysis tools to better quantify the impacts of change in long term ecological observations
To see our active projects, check out our lab GitHub
Katie won a major award for her dissertation!
Look at that! Dr. Katie McNamara Manning’s won the outstanding dissertation award from Green Roofs For Healthy Cities, a major international green infrastructure professional organization. We’re so proud- and it really was an outstanding dissertation 🙂
Nice paper, Kathryn!
Kathryn Grage’s paper based on her undergrad work at the University of Richmond just dropped in Diversity and Distributions. Check it out here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ddi.13799
Congratulations Katie!
What an exciting day this has been! Katie’s second paper “Insect pollinator and natural enemy communities in green roof and ground-level urban habitats” has just come out in Urban Ecosystems! Check it out: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11252-023-01499-6
Prospective Student?
What’s with the foxes? That’s Research Fox, dressed up and ready to do some ecology! The image was a gift to Dr. Bahlai upon the completion of her Mozilla fellowship. Research Fox hangs out on this page to remind us to approach our science with the open, inclusive, and reproducible principles in mind- we do better science together!
Bahlai Lab of Applied Computational Ecology 