Overview
Our lab sits at the intersection of global change entomology and One Health, working to understand how insect distributions, phenology, and community dynamics are impacted under dynamic environmental conditions.
Why It Matters: Insects are essential to multiple ecosystem functions and shape major One Health challenges, from vector-borne disease and food security to biodiversity conservation. Their sensitivity to environmental conditions makes them powerful sentinels of environmental change. Understanding where, when, and why insect responses vary across populations, communities, and environments can advance ecological science and improve One Health decision-making.
Our Approach
The core questions we ask fall within the field of distributional ecology, where we aim to understand and predict where, when, why… and ultimately, what will happen next for insect distributions across taxa, systems, and environments. Because ecological processes operate across spatiotemporal scales, our work spans local to macroscale patterns and short- to long-term dynamics.
Our approach is interdisciplinary, combining entomology and ecology with geospatial science, data science, and quantitative modeling. Many of the questions we care about cannot be answered through individual field studies alone, so we build reproducible workflows that integrate and harmonize diverse data sources across scales.
We have particular expertise in zoonotic arbovirus systems, while working more broadly across taxa and ecological systems. We draw on data from surveillance and monitoring, community science, pest management, remote sensing, and environmental observations to address questions and develop tools and applications at scales relevant to ecological theory and One Health management.
Research Themes
Distributions: We model past, current, and future distributions of insects and their ecological systems in response to landscape and climates.
Gunay et al. 2025
Prediction & Forecasting: We develop predictive and forecasting models to anticipate insect population dynamics, distributions, and transmission hazard under current and future environmental conditions.
Gaussian Markov Random Fields to capture spatiotemporal dynamics of 2018 Florida Department of Health West Nile virus sentinel chicken seroconversion.
Phenology: Timing matters. We study how insect life cycles, activity, and seasonal dynamics are impacted under variable environmental conditions, and what these dynamics mean for trophic interactions and ecosystem processes.
Example of insect phenology and trophic interactions. Here, phenological overlap increases host–vector interactions and transmission potential, while mismatch reduces both.
Decision Support: We work closely with partners across multiple sectors to develop tools that can be used to support data driven management decisions.
Baecher et al. 2025 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2025.180308
Open Data and Tools: We are active in developing new methods, open data resources, and tools across the broader community.
We are developing new tools to identify overlapping insect generations for multivoltine species to improve understanding of insect phenology. Bauer et al. (in prep).
Using West Nile virus as a model system, former PhD student Amely Bauer developed a new trait based approach to account for both insect vector competence + host use to understand and predict joint distributions of transmission hazard in enzootic and epizootic cycles may occur. Bauer et al. 2025 https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.72705
We are collaborative, and this work has been funded through multiple federal and state programs, including NSF, USDA, Department of Defense, CDC, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, as well as seed funding opportunities through the University of Florida.
Links to manuscripts and code:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=MVSUB9sAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
andCampbell Lab GitHub:
