Representative work:
Arroyo, E., Uriarte, M. & Muscarella, R. (in review). Complex associations between intraspecific trait variation in tree species and environmental heterogeneity in space and time
Arroyo, E., Uriarte, M. & Menge, D. (August 11, 2023). “Modeling the eco-evolutionary origins of trait variation.” Presentation at Ecological Society of America meeting.
Arroyo, E.* & Dabke, D. (2016). Rumors with Personality: Agent-based Rumor Spread in a Social Network with Network and Parameters from Facebook Data. SIAM Undergraduate Journal. Vol 9. (*equal co-authorship)
You may be asking… “why do I work on what I work on scientifically?” One of my favorite professors described ecologists as professional mourners, which perfectly put words to a feeling I have had for years. I feel the climate catastrophe on a personal level: the biodiversity that humanity so carelessly destroys is part of my heritage as a Costa Rican American. As an applied ecologist, I've worked in Earth's most biodiverse regions. I have also seen these areas reduced to monocultures or damaged by extreme events like fires and floods. My work as a scientist is based in hope that we can find natural laws about biodiversity. I also just really really like doing math.
In my PhD at Columbia*, I think about within-species variation and how it effects community ecology. My current thinking is about species rarity. In the past, I’ve worked on lianas at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and rumor-spread models at Duke. My background is in theoretical math and I (really) love probability and complex systems theory. I am currently a Teaching Fellow at Columbia where I teach a class entitled “Explaining Biodiversity: Niches, Complex Systems, Chaos, and Neutral Theory”
*under the advisement of the fabulous Duncan Menge and Maria Uriarte