DPhil. Student

Current Members | Former Members | Photos


Chris Trisos

Chris Trisos

Details

Name: Chris Trisos
Position: DPhil. Student
Email: christopher.trisos@zoo.ox.ac.uk

Autobiography

I completed my B.Sc. in ecology and economics and then an Honours degree in botany at the University of Cape Town. Whilst there, most of my research time was spent investigating the evolution of annuality in two genera of Asteraceae on the arid west coast of South Africa and the expansion of thicket vegetation within a mesic savanna ecosystem. After some time spent working/travelling and on an awesome tropical biology field course in the Usambara Mountains of Tanzania, I came to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship to study for the M.Sc. in Biology (2008). Here, my research projects were on the relationship between plumage colouration and parental care in great tits and theory on public goods dynamics and their effect upon cooperative behaviour. I am now doing my Dphil on community ecology, supervised by Joe Tobias and Nat Seddon.

Research Activities

A lot of debate within ecology is focussed on what rules might govern the assembly of local communities, the effect of different spatial scales upon community assembly processes and if the concept of a local community is one that is of any use to ecologists. Within this broader context, my Dphil focuses on elucidating the relative importance of processes determining the assembly of South American bird communities at a range of spatial scales, from small forest plots along an altitudinal transect in the Peruvian Andes to larger regional scales such as river basins. I will use a combination of ecological and phylogenetic methods and hopefully some experimental studies to test models of community assembly based upon habitat filtering, limiting similarity and Hubbell's neutral theory.

Selected Recent Papers

Bergh NG, Trisos CH, Verboon TA (2011) Phylogeny of the “Ifloga clade” (Asteraceae, Gnaphalieae), a lineage occurring disjointly in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere, and inclusion of Trichogyne in synonymy with Ifloga. Taxon 60:1065-1075.