Rosenberg Institute Seminar Series - Amy Freestone

Amy L. Freestone, Senior Scientist & Managing Director, Marine Invasions Research Lab, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

Biogeography of Predation and Impacts on Marine Invasions in the Tropics

My research bridges community ecology and macroecology to disentangle the drivers that shape our natural communities in a changing world.  I focus on understanding feedbacks among processes that operate at the community scale and across regional to continental scales.  Using experimental field approaches primarily in benthic marine systems, I explore (1) the impact of species interactions on community assembly and ecosystem function, particularly resistance to invasion by non-native species, and (2) how these processes structure patterns of community composition and diversity in space and time.  One of my principal interests lies in understanding how these dynamics change across broad biogeographic gradients that define our biosphere, such as latitude.  Therefore, my field studies span the subarctic to the tropics.   

Bio: Dr. Amy Freestone is a community ecologist and the Managing Director of the Marine Invasions Research Laboratory at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Maryland, with a satellite lab located on the SFSU Romberg Tiburon Campus.  She joined SERC in May of 2024 after 15 years as faculty at Temple University in Philadelphia.  From 2020-2024, she was the founding director of the Temple Amber Field Station, a platform for field-based research and education.  She completed her PhD in Ecology at the University of California, Davis and was a postdoctoral fellow at SERC.