Tanya Strydom

Tanya Strydom

Postdoctoral Researcher

School of Biosciences, University of Sheffield

Biography

A Scientist in training (and self-diagnosed theoretical ecologist) who loves playing outside in the mountains and wants to understand why communities are structured the way that they are. Being the maths geek nerd that I am my research has a distinctly computational flavour and aims to help us improve our understanding and ability to make more global generalisations about ecological communities through the use of food webs - although I sometimes find myself reverting back to my ‘microecology’ roots and getting caught up in the weeds at times 🙈. Current interests include (but are not limited to): ecological networks, species traits, the role of scale and how all that fits together. Now also featuring dinosaurs! 🦖

A plant ecologist by inclination I can usually be found gushing about how cute a particular grass (or succulent) is, hanging off of the side of a mountain or going on bike-ventures to various coffee shops. When the weather forces me indoors I’m most likely spending way more time than I need to trying to automate a process that could be done in a few minutes, exercising my creative side or trying to find new (and pretty) ways in which to visualise data and results i.e. combining my geeky self with my artistic alter-ego.

Interests

  • Computational approaches to ecological questions
  • FAIR and Open Science
  • Data visualisation
  • Dabbling in artistic pursuits

Education

  • PhD in Biological Sciences, 2024

    Université de Montréal | Canada

  • MSc in Ecology and Biodiversity, 2020

    Stockholms Universitet | Sweden

  • BSc (Hons) in Plant Sciences, 2017

    University of Pretoria | South Africa

Friends

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BecksLab

Theoretical ecology lab headed by Andrew Beckerman

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BIOS2

Computational Biodiversity Science and Services (BIOS2) training program

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PFTCourses

Plant Functional Traits Courses

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Poisot Lab

Quantitative and computational ecology lab headed by Timothée Poisot

Recent Publications

Bootstrapping outperforms community-weighted approaches for estimating the shapes of phenotypic distributions

In Methods in Ecology and Evolution
Bootstrapping outperforms community-weighted approaches for estimating the shapes of phenotypic distributions

Predicting metawebs: Transfer of graph embeddings can help alleviate spatial data deficiencies

In Methods in Ecology and Evolution
Predicting metawebs: Transfer of graph embeddings can help alleviate spatial data deficiencies

Food web reconstruction through phylogenetic transfer of low-rank network representation

Methods in Ecology and Evolution
Food web reconstruction through phylogenetic transfer of low-rank network representation

A Roadmap Toward Predicting Species Interaction Networks (Across Space and Time)

In Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
A Roadmap Toward Predicting Species Interaction Networks (Across Space and Time)

Projects

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CASCaDE

netwrok reconstruction; paleo networks; mass extinctions

Project Wombat

Wombling (not about actual wombats); edge detection; spatial boundaries; and how we can apply this to ecological networks.

Project One Ring

What does the future of predicting networks look like? And what types of questions should we be asking?

Project Pokédex

Network reconstruction; phylogenetic inference; network embedding

Project Malcolm

Singular Value Decomposition; network complexity; network prediction and possibly some network assembly.

TidyTuesday

An R4DS weekly data project initiative emphasising the use of tidyverse to summarise and visualise data