Dr Chris Terry
Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow
 |
|
christopher.terry@biology.ox.ac.uk Research Interests
I am a community ecologist with interests in interaction networks and responses to global change. I use a mixture of theory, modelling, experiments and large datasets.
Currently I am a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow where my project is ‘Climate change and species range shifts: accounting for ecological complexity‘. This will involve some small and large scale modelling, as well as lab experiments with Drosophila looking at interspecific competition in variable environments.
Previously (2020-22), I was a postdoc at Queen Mary University of London in the group of Axel Rossberg as part of a NERC Highlight Topic grant ‘Mechanisms and prediction of large-scale ecological responses to environmental change’. Before that I had a short postdoc in CERO looking at the effects of temperature on networks of Drosophila-parasitoid interactions. In my DPhil, also as part of CERO, I investigated how trophic interaction modifications act within larger food web contexts using both experimental and modelling approaches. While the effects of variable traits in small community modules have been well studied, it is currently far from clear whether in natural systems the effects are likely to be mitigated or amplified.
Much of my work is computer based with a weight towards ecological theory and statistics. I have developed and released two R CRAN packages for network ecology: bipartiteD3 for interactive visualisations of bipartite networks and cassandRa for exploring undersampled networks by identifying ‘most-likely’ missing links and conducting observation bootstrapping. At CEH Wallingford I have worked on the automatic classification of images of ladybirds with machine learning tools, and showing how they can be significantly improved by allowing the model to synthesise the contextual metadata of the record.
Selected Publications
For a full up-to-date list (including preprints) see my Google Scholar
- Terry, J.C.D., O’Sullivan, J.L. & Rossberg, A.G. (2022) No pervasive relationship between species size and local abundance trends Nature Ecology & Evolution 6:140-144
- Terry, J.C.D., O’Sullivan, J.L. & Rossberg, A.G. (2022) Synthesising the multiple impacts of climatic variability on community responses to climate change Ecography e06123
- O’Sullivan, J. L., Terry, J.C.D. & Rossberg, A.G. (2021) Intrinsic ecological dynamics drive biodiversity turnover in model metacommunities Nature Communications 12:3627
- Jeffs. C.J.*, Terry, J.C.D.* & 10 others. (2021) Molecular analyses reveal consistent food web structure with elevation in rainforest Drosophila – parasitoid communities Ecography 44:403-413
- Terry, J.C.D.*, Chen, J.*, & Lewis, O.T. (2021) The effect of natural enemies on the coexistence of competing species-an empirical test using modern coexistence theory Journal of Animal Ecology 90:2277-2288
- Terry, J.C.D., Roy, H.E. & August, T.A. (2020) Thinking like a naturalist: enhancing computer vision of citizen science images by harnessing contextual data, Methods in Ecology and Evolution 11:303-315 + journal blog:
- Terry, J.C.D. & Lewis, O.T. (2020) Finding missing links in ecological networks. Ecology 101:e03047
- Gripenberg, S.,Basset, Y., Lewis, O., Terry, J.C.D. + 16 others. (2019) A highly resolved food web for insect seed predators in a species-rich tropical forest, Ecology Letters 22:1638-1649
- Terry, J.C.D., Morris, R.J. & Bonsall, M.B. (2017) Trophic Interaction Modifications: An empirical and theoretical framework Ecology Letters 20:1219-1230