Dallas R. Levey

Dallas (he/him) is a PhD student in the Department of Biology and Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. Dallas strives to understand the spatiotemporal drivers of biodiversity changes in bird and plant communities, with a focus on working landscapes in tropical regions of Mexico and Costa Rica. He aims to couple this understanding with the functionality of birds and plants to answer questions related to the ecological, social, and cultural implications of biodiversity changes at varying levels, from species and functional groups to ecosystems and people. With knowledge of the effects of biodiversity change on people and wildlife and established links between bird functionality to vegetation characteristics, he ultimately aims to develop conservation and methodological tools to improve the ability to detect the effects of biodiversity change on communities and develop metrics to estimate habitat and ecosystem health. Dallas earned his BSc in Integrative Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his MSc in Ciencias Biológicas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México through a research project on the avifauna of Palenque, Chiapas.