Anshuman Swain

Research Interests I am interested in understanding how abiotic and biotic interactions structure individuals, species, communities, and ecosystems across different spatiotemporal scales, and to explore these questions through a combination of comparative- and trait-based approaches, ecological and paleontological fieldwork, the use of natural history collections, theoretical models, and data-driven methods. My past work has spanned different levels of biological organization, and ecological and evolutionary timescales, and I hope to continue to use biological interactions as a lens by which to investigate key themes in evolution, ecology, and behavior. Some of the major questions in my research include: 1. How do distributions of ecological communities respond to global change? 2. How are ecological interactions shaped by the environment and eco-evolutionary histories? 3. How do evolutionary, ecological and behavioral innovations arise in organisms? A few focal systems in my work include: (1) plants, insects and their interactions; (2) planktic foraminiferal ecology; (3) microbial community ecology; (4) ecological networks and complex systems. However, we are interested in general biodiversity informatics across all scales: from individual specimens and species to ecosystem-level dynamics.