Welcome to the home of the Sabo Laboratory at ASU! Our research focuses on theoretical and empirical aspects of food webs in river and riparian ecosystems. We are particularly interested in the interfaces between population approaches (i.e., demography, stochasticity) and community questions and between ecosystem approaches (i.e., energy and nutrient budgets) and some of the same community questions. More specifically, we have three research themes:
1) Quantifying flows of energy, nutrients and water from river to riparian food webs and evaluating the impacts of these spatial flows on the strength of key species interactions in terrestrial food webs. Learn more...
2) Evaluating the relative roles of disturbance, ecosystem size and resource availability in determining the length of food chains in stream ecosystems. Learn more...
3) Integrating variability-or environmental stochasticity-and statistical approaches to measuring population persistence into models of species interactions to understand the effects of non-native species in native communities. Learn more...
Our research efforts involve a significant field component, including large-scale experiments and broad-scale syntheses of existing data. In addition to field research, our work also relies heavily on theoretical and statistical models to generate predictions for experimentation and answers to questions not amenable to experiments. We invite field-savvy students to apply to help craft fruitful approaches to answering questions in these three research areas. Please explore the website to learn more about the our current research and the people who currently work in the lab.