Back to all people

Areas of Interest

Invasion Ecology
Urban Ecology
Informatics
Invasion Ecology
Urban Ecology
Informatics
Invasion Ecology
Urban Ecology
Informatics

I am a graduate student studying biological invasions at the global scale. I am interested in current and historic patterns of species invasion, and am developing workflows to link citizen science invasive occurrence datasets with global invasive species bioinformatics efforts. I am particularly interested in the environmental niches of invasive species and their temporal dynamics: a strong understanding of short and long timescale niche dynamics is critical for accurate predictions of future invasive species range expansion and impact, and efficient allocation of conservation resources.

Before Yale, I completed my undergraduate degree in environmental biology at Columbia University. I studied New York City pigeons for my senior thesis, exploring the responses of pigeons to urbanization using flight initiation distances that I collected. Since coming to Yale, I have worked as a research associate with Map of Life, helping to curate varied biodiversity datasets. I have also worked on STOAT (https://mol.org/stoat/), a tool for the environmental annotation of biodiversity data, as both a developer and a tester.

Out of the lab, I am a passionate (but sometimes not-so-skillful) birdwatcher, with my preferred habitat being the sometimes dirty but always lively parks of New York City. I am an avid urban explorer, and enjoy long walks in the city, staring at weeds on the sidewalk along the way while passersby give me weird looks.

Hobbies

Birding, Board games, Scaring pigeons


Li R, A Ranipeta, J Wilshire, J Malczyk, M Duong, R Guralnick, A Wilson, W Jetz. 2021. A cloud-based toolbox for the versatile environmental annotation of biodiversity data. PLoS Biology. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001460

Carlen EJ, R Li, KM Winchell. 2021. Urbanization predicts flight initiation distance in feral pigeons (Columba livia) across New York City. Animal Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2021.06.021