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Prospective student? Check out our lab policy documents here!
PLEASE READ THESE DOCUMENTS BEFORE APPLYING

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.

Our three major areas of research are currently:
1) Examining how human factors in data collection (i.e study length, sampling methodology) impact the biodiversity monitoring, and information trade-offs of various monitoring approaches.
2) Understanding function/diversity relationships in insect communities, developing metrics to quantify these relationships, and understanding how these relationships are altered by disturbances like landscape management or climate change.
-and-
3) Developing break-point analysis tools to better quantify the impacts of change in long term ecological observations.

To take a look at our active projects, check out our lab GitHub.

Dr. Bahlai is available on a limited basis for statistical/data/coding consults. Please see her booking policy here.

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!