Charles

Dr. Charles Marsh

Academic Qualifications

PhD in Tropical Ecology, Imperial College London, UK

MRes in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, Imperial College London, UK

BA in Biological Sciences, University of Oxford, UK

Research areas

Spatial ecology, community ecology, biodiversity distributions, spatial scale, data-poor species

Research interests

My research interests are primarily in the distributions of biodiversity and ecosystem function, and how they are affected by anthropogenic disturbance, particularly fragmentation and habitat modification, with an emphasis on community-level processes (e.g. alpha- and beta-diversity). I am particularly interested in the spatial scaling of these processes, and decoupling the effects of scales of observation from interpretations of spatial patterns of diversity. Much of this research involved the creation of new R packages and the development of novel analytical techniques, as well as generating automated high-performance computing workflows for processing biodiversity data.

Biography

I have a mix of field and computational experience, having completed postdocs and research fellowships at Yale University, Oxford University, the Natural History Museum of London and Leeds University. Fieldwork has included research across the Brazilian Amazon, Borneo, Madagascar and the Comoros Islands, although I no longer get to do as much as I would like.

Selected publications:

  • Marsh, C.J., Syfert, M.M., Aletrari, E., Gavish, Y., Kunin, W.E., Brummitt, N., 2023. The effect of sampling effort and methodology on range size estimates of poorly-recorded species for IUCN Red List assessments. Biodivers Conserv 32, 1105–1123. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-023-02543-9
  • Marsh, C.J., Feitosa, R.M., Louzada, J., Ewers, R.M., 2018. Is β-diversity of Amazonian ant and dung beetles communities elevated at rainforest edges? Journal of Biogeography 45, 1966–1979. https://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.13357
  • Marsh, C.J., Ewers, R.M., 2013. A fractal-based sampling design for ecological surveys quantifying β-diversity. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 4, 63–72. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-210x.2012.00256.x
    1. R packages:
    2. sdmProfiling: Marsh, C.J., Gavish, Y., Kuemmerlen, M., Stoll, S., Haase, P., Kunin, W.E., 2023. SDM profiling: A tool for assessing the information-content of sampled and unsampled locations for species distribution models. Ecological Modelling 475, 110170. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2022.110170
    3. downscale: Marsh, C.J., Barwell, L.J., Gavish, Y., Kunin, W.E., 2018. downscale: an R package for downscaling species occupancy from coarse-grain data to predict occupancy at fine-grain sizes. Journal of Statistical Software 86, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v086.c03
    4. cooccur: Griffith, D.M., Veech, J.A., Marsh, C.J., 2016. cooccur: probabilistic species co-occurrence analysis in R. Journal of Statistical Software 69, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v069.c02