I am a quantitative ecologist with interests in community dynamics, ecosystem functioning, sudden tipping points, and resource management. I am particularly interested in ecosystem stability, though my collaborative network is interdisciplinary and spans pure mathematics and health sciences.

Stability is the ability of an ecosystem to return to equilibrium in response to a disturbance. These disturbances could be singular pulse events like fire, or increasing press stresses like climate change. My work combines simulated datasets with long-term monitoring programs to test stability indicators and hypotheses across biological scales. Doing so ensures that proposed indicators are both practical and reliable for on-the-ground practitioners. I am currently applying these techniques to collapsing seabird populations to identify which dimensions of seabird ecology (abundance, morphology or behaviour) provide the earliest warnings of extinction.

More generally, my research focuses on:

• Stability and responses of ecosystems
• Interactions between species and their environment
• The practical prediction of tipping points
• Conservation of ecosystem functioning and services

Further information and practical examples are available at https://duncanobrien.github.io.