On Monday, Payton Phillips successfully defended her doctoral thesis titled “Understanding the influence of anthropogenic habitat modification on urban animals: case studies of Caribbean lizards and North American mammals.” She presented a brilliant overview of her three thesis chapters in an engaging and accessible manner.
In her presentation, Payton discussed the influence of urbanization and road networks on the dispersal of three lizard species in the Caribbean, the behavioral responses of urban-adapted mammal species to urbanization across temporal and spatial scales, and the effects of landscape-scale urbanization and local-scale vegetation density on tick-borne disease dynamics.
The results from these chapters enhance our understanding of how human-induced changes impact urban animals. Some of Payton’s research has already been published, which you can read here.
Payton has been a valued member of the iEcoLab since 2018, and she will be greatly missed. She is moving on to a postdoctoral position at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory at the University of Georgia, where we are confident she will achieve great things. We wish Dr. Phillips the best of luck in her future endeavors!