Research Interests

My research interests are primarily human-ecosystem interactions, within the context of human health, and sustainable land and natural resource management and policy. My current research focuses on interdisciplinary applications of ecology, including human ecology and the ecosystem health model to humans in place-based communities. I am presently working in two areas. One of these deals with local and indigenous knowledge and values in community-based natural resources management. The other addresses integration of ecosystem and human health at the level of watersheds (ahupua'a as they are called in the ancient Hawaiian agricultural system) and regional ecosystems. My particular research focus at present is the evolutionary ecology of infectious disease emergence.

My interests in biological diversity conservation began with research in island biogeography, population genetics and the effects of habitat fragmentation on extinction. My involvement in interdisciplinary application of these and other fields of conservation began when I co-organized the first international scientific conference on the global loss of biological diversity twenty years ago. I subsequently worked on defining biological diversity for policy applications, and establishing conservation biology as an academic field. My work subsequently broadened to consider biological diversity conservation in its sociological, cultural and economic context for management and policy applications. Most recently my research and teaching has shifted to a focus on the linkages between ecology and human health, in terms ecologically-based models of individual and community well-being and the linkages between ecological systems and human health.