Welcome to the Minchin Lab in the Department of Biological Sciences at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Though I retired from SIUE in December, 2022, I remain active in research and will be maintaining this website. I will no longer be accepting new Master's students into my lab but I am able to serve on the committees of Master's students in Biological Sciences at SIUE.
My research focuses on community ecology, conservation biology, and restoration ecology. I use a combination of computer modeling, field observations, and experiments to address both theoretical and applied research questions in these areas. Two major themes are the development and evaluation of new statistical tools to analyze community variation in space and time and the application of these and traditional methods to applied research questions in conservation and restoration.
Mt. Field Plateau, Tasmania, Australia was the study area for my sabbatical research project in January-May, 2019. With the help of John Davies, an old friend and colleague whom I met at the University of Tasmania in the 1970's, a network of 234 vegetation plots, initially surveyed in 1980-1982 as part of my Ph.D. research were re-sampled using the same methods. The aim was to examine changes in the plant communities and test for effects of climate change. A paper reporting initial results was presented at the International Association for Vegetation Science (IAVS) 62nd annual symposium in Bremen, Germany in July 2019. The research has subsequently been reported in several other conference presentations and journal articles are currently in preparation.
Follow us on Facebook
