Mansi Mungee

Mansi Mungee

Profile

The breadth of my interest stems primarily from my doctoral work where I integrated several seemingly independent disciplines within community ecology to compare the patterns in diversity and assembly for two disparate, but interdependent animal groups - hawkmoths and birds. I compared elevational patterns in alpha & beta diversity (taxonomic, functional & phylogenetic), relative abundance distributions, trait-environment relationship (sensu Bergmann’s & Allen’s Rule), and community assembly.  Apart from generating high quality abundance based data-sets from a little-explored biodiversity hotspot, the major contribution from my PhD research was the development of a novel photogrammetric method for obtaining morphological traits of nocturnal phototrophic insects from digital images.

At UoL, I am a Research Fellow in a large, multi-collaborative project “Drivers and Repurcussions of UK Insect Declines” or DRUID, to collate and synthesize some of the best available datasets on insect declines from across the country, and determine spatio-temporal patterns using multiple currencies of diversity such as richness, biomass, abundance, etc. 

Research interests

My overarching research interests are community ecology and biogeography. I am particularly interested in extending the advances of trait- and phylogeny-based analyses to understand spatio-temporal patterns in diversity and assembly of ecological communities, especially along environmental gradients.

I am also keen on developing novel methods that integrate machine learning and pattern recognition to generate ecologically meaningful data (traits, pigments, etc.) from field and/or museum digital collections of insect pollinators. Although I do enjoy the comfort associated with working on moths and birds, my interests over the last few years have become more question driven, and are not limited to any particular taxa.

<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Any research projects I'm currently working on will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://environment.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>

Research groups and institutes

  • River Basin Processes and Management