Mansi Mungee

Research Fellow in Insect Ecology, School of Geography

www.mansim-ecoblog.com

My overarching research interests are community ecology and biogeography. I am particularly interested in extending the advances of trait- and phylogeny-based analyses to understand spatio-temporal patterns in diversity and assembly of ecological communities, especially along environmental gradients.

I am also keen on developing novel methods that integrate machine learning and pattern recognition to generate ecologically meaningful data (traits, pigments, etc.) from field and/or museum digital collections of insect pollinators. Although I do enjoy the comfort associated with working on moths and birds, my interests over the last few years have become more question driven, and are not limited to any particular taxa.

The breadth of my interest stems primarily from my doctoral work where I integrated several seemingly independent disciplines within community ecology to compare the patterns in diversity and assembly for two disparate, but interdependent animal groups – hawkmoths and birds. I compared elevational patterns in alpha & beta diversity (taxonomic, functional & phylogenetic), relative abundance distributions, trait-environment relationship (sensu Bergmann’s & Allen’s Rule), and community assembly. Apart from generating high quality abundance based data-sets from a little-explored biodiversity hotspot, the major contribution from my PhD research was the development of a novel photogrammetric method for obtaining morphological traits of nocturnal phototrophic insects from digital images (recently published in Ecological Entomology). Interested readers may read more about my Research here.