Erica Henry
My research interests lie in understanding what causes threatened and endangered species to be rare, and how to use ecological knowledge of species and their habitats to create effective conservation strategies. I am most interested in answering questions about how endangered species populations respond to environmental disturbances such as fires, hurricanes, and climate change. I work closely with land managers to translate this information into habitat restoration plans and to evaluate how restoration actions affect target species.
For my dissertation research, I focused on how to restore disturbance in fire-adapted systems that harbor endangered species, the use of surrogate species for evaluating restoration success, and the impacts of climate change, specifically changes in precipitation patterns, on butterfly populations confined to low-lying islands. I used three of the world’s rarest butterflies (Bartram’s scrub-hairstreak, St. Francis’ satyr, and Miami blue) to answer these questions.
In September 2017, my disturbance restoration experiment on Big Pine Key, FL was crushed by the eastern eyewall of hurricane Irma. Thanks to an NSF Rapid grant, my post-doctoral studies will evaluate how interacting disturbances affect population dynamics. For this work I focus on an endangered butterfly, Bartram’s scrub-hairstreak, and its hostplant, pineland croton, and how their populations respond to the interaction of restoration actions and hurricane landfall.
