Kai Kopecky

I am a community ecologist who seeks to understand how shifting disturbance regimes create novel environmental settings for ecosystem recovery. I largely focus on dynamics surrounding foundation species, and how their remnant structures that persist after disturbance (known as material legacies) can affect properties of resilience. I use a combination of field experiments, quantitative modeling, remote sensing, and data science to understand how the material legacies of foundation species shape the trajectories of the ecosystems they inhabit.

During my graduate studies, I spent much of my time conducting field research in French Polynesia with the NSF-funded Moorea Coral Reef Long Term Ecological Research project.

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Environmental Data Science Innovation & Impact Lab based at the University of Colorado, Boulder. There, I have expanded my research on material legacy effects to other ecosystems, both marine and terrestrial, across different LTER sites that span the tropics to the Arctic Circle.