My research focuses on interactions of wildlife with plants, with each other, and with parasites and pathogens. I am particularly interested in the consequences of wildlife extirpation, for example due to bushmeat poaching, as well as wildlife return, such as through rewilding and colonization of novel habitats such as cities.

I work in regions where forest is the natural vegetation, both in the tropics and in the temperate zone. My principal experimental sites are the Barro Colorado Nature Monument in Panama, and National Park De Hoge Veluwe in the Netherlands.

Much of my work involves the use of camera traps, for example to assess the abundance of terrestrial wildlife, and to quantify interactions. We develop new methods for doing these measurements. We also built a platform, called Agouti, to manage, process and store images for camera-trapping studies: http://agouti.eu.

My vertebrate-plant interactions research aims to understand how vertebrates affect the species composition, diversity and functioning of forest ecosystems, for example through species-specific seed dispersal, seed predation and herbivory. What specific roles vertebrates play in forests? How do vertebrate species they interact with different plant species? How do they contribute to the maintenance of high plant species diversity? And, ultimately, how does degradation of vertebrate communities due to bushmeat hunting and forest fragmentation or the wildlife restoration such as through rewilding affect the species composition and diversity of forests?