Kate Thibault: Scientist, Mammal Ecologist (FSU)

Kate Thibault earned her B.S. in Biology at Boston College and her Ph.D. at the University of New Mexico. Her dissertation research focused on the temporal dynamics in the structure and function of the desert rodent community at the LTREB site near Portal, AZ. Concurrently, she also conducted extensive field research on bats throughout the public lands of New Mexico. She came to NEON from Utah State University, where she was a postdoctoral fellow in macroecology. Kate is interested in understanding the mechanisms underlying community assembly across space and time and, therefore, biodiversity and dynamics in this changing world. She uses a combination of field techniques and ecoinformatics to this end. Her field experience has encompassed rodents, bats, and cougars, primarily in the southwestern U.S., and her informatics experience has involved such databases as the Breeding Bird Survey and Forest Inventory Analysis, as well as leading an effort to create the first mammal community database.

Selected publications:
Thibault, K. M., E. P. White, A. H. Hurlbert, and S. K. M. Ernest. 2011. Multimodality in the individual size distributions of bird communities. Global Ecology & Biogeography, 20:145-153.

Thibault, K. M., S. K. M. Ernest, and J. H. Brown. 2010. Redundant or complementary? Impact of a colonizing species on community structure and function. Oikos, 119:1719-1726.

Thibault, K. M., S. K. M. Ernest, E. P. White, J. H. Brown, and J. R. Goheen. 2010. Long-term insights into the influence of precipitation on community dynamics in desert rodents. Journal of Mammalogy, 91:787-797.

Thibault, K. M., and J. H. Brown. 2008. Impact of an extreme climatic event on community assembly. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 105:3410-3415.

Adams, R. A., and K. M. Thibault. 2006.  Temporal resource partitioning by bats at water holes. Journal of Zoology, 270:466-472.

Thibault, K. M., E. P. White, and S. K. M. Ernest. 2004. Temporal dynamics in the structure and composition of a desert rodent community. Ecology, 85:2649-2655.