My research leads a bit of a double life. Sometimes I work in tropical forest research in the Amazon, Borneo, Madagascar and the Comoros Islands on taxa as diverse as birds, butterflies, dung beetles, large mammals and ants. In darker times (which, lets face it, is pretty much all the time these days) I am tied to the computer developing advanced methods and statistical analyses of large-scale and simulated spatial datasets. These computers have generally been located in the less exotic corners of the UK (Imperial college with Rob Ewers, Leeds University with Bill Kunin, and Oxford University with Andy Hector).
Both approaches focus on anthropogenic disturbance, particularly fragmentation and habitat modification with an emphasis on community-level processes (eg alpha- and beta-diversity). In particular I look at the scaling of these processes, how we can decouple the effects of scales of observation from interpretations of spatial patterns of diversity, and how we can use these patterns. Much of this research involved the creation of new R packages and the development of novel analytical techniques.
Marsh, C. J., Gavish, Y., Kunin, W. E., & Brummitt, N. A. (2019). Mind the gap: Can downscaling Area of Occupancy overcome sampling gaps when assessing IUCN Red List status? Diversity and Distributions, 025, 1832–1845. https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.12983
Marsh, C. J., Barwell, L. J., Gavish, Y., & Kunin, W. E. (2018). downscale: An R package for downscaling species occupancy from coarse-grain data to predict occupancy at fine-grain sizes. Journal of Statistical Software, 86(Code Snippet 3), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v086.c03
Marsh, C. J., Feitosa, R. M., Louzada, J., & Ewers, R. M. (2018). Is β-diversity of Amazonian ant and dung beetles communities elevated at rainforest edges? Journal of Biogeography, 45(8), 1966–1979. https://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.13357
Pfeifer, M., Lefebvre, V., Peres, C. A., Banks-Leite, C., Wearn, O. R., Marsh, C. J., Butchart, S. H. M., Arroyo-Rodríguez, V., Barlow, J., Cerezo, A., Cisneros, L., D’Cruze, N., Faria, D., Hadley, A., Harris, S. M., Klingbeil, B. T., Kormann, U., Lens, L., Medina-Rangel, G. F., … Ewers, R. M. (2017). Creation of forest edges has a global impact on forest vertebrates. Nature, 551, 187–195. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature24457
Marsh, C. J., & Ewers, R. M. (2013). A fractal-based sampling design for ecological surveys quantifying β-diversity. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 4(1), 63–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-210x.2012.00256.x