MASTERS RESEARCH

My Masters thesis uses a macroecological approach to study a highly invasive species - the European green crab.

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First I mine and combine global abundance datasets from online databases (GBif, Inat, OBIS, Bison) with satellite SST and air temperature data. I used this information to map the green crabs known range and thermal distribution. Then I used a two-stage meta-analytic approach to build my models. I predicted that changes in green crab abundance would be related to local weather, particularly on the distribution edges when warming is present. These predictions follow the abundant-centre hypothesis (Brown, 1994) which predicts that edge populations are exposed to less than ideal conditions; as well as the pose to prosper hypothesis (Sorte et al., 2013) which predicts that invasive species will do better than natives under climate change.