Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

Paula is an ecologist working on identifying invasive species from diversity surveys using metabarcoding and eDNA techniques. Her most recent research projects used benchmarking to improve the outcome of metabarcoding methods in estimating diversity of marine organisms. In general, Paula enjoys collaborative, multi-disciplinary research related to: 1) synthesizing data on species traits, distributions, and their environment to better understand the mechanisms that promote, maintain, and can alter biodiversity; 2) contributing to develop and test statistical methods to synthesize quantitative data and to quantify species diversity.