Dominique Maucieri
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity
Biodiversity change
Biography
My research spans diverse systems and taxa, beginning with undergraduate work on bat communities at the University of Calgary and a shark research internship in South Africa. I completed my MSc at the University of Victoria studying coral reef responses to marine heatwaves and local pollution. During my PhD, I expanded this work to coral reefs, temperate kelp forests, and subtidal invertebrate communities. Across systems, I focus on often overlooked community-level features such as invertebrates, compositional change, and subtle shifts in species interactions that are critical for understanding biodiversity and ecosystem change.
Research
My research at LCAB aims to explain why estimates of biodiversity change often differ across studies by examining the roles of analytical decisions, data limitations, and real ecological variation. Using large, publicly available datasets like BioTIME, I am investigating how choices around biodiversity metrics, data aggregation, and treatment of species absences influence trend estimates. I will also assess how uneven spatial, temporal, and taxonomic sampling affects conclusions using resampling, reweighting, and stratification approaches. This work seeks to clarify when disagreements in biodiversity trends reflect methodological artefacts versus meaningful ecological signals, with the goal of improving how biodiversity change is measured and reported.
Publication highlights
Maucieri, D.G., Kushner, D.J. and Bates, A.E. (2025). Enduring a major marine heatwave: The role of local cool refugia and kelp forests in the resilience of marine invertebrates. Diversity and Distributions 31(6):1-13.
Maucieri, D.G., Starko, S. and Baum, J.K. (2023). Tipping points and interactive effects of chronic human disturbance and acute heat stress on coral diversity. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 290:20230209.
Baum, J.K., Claar, D.C., Tietjen, K.L., Magel, J.M.T., Maucieri, D.G., Cobb, K.M. and McDevitt-Irwin, J.M. (2023). Transformation of coral communities subjected to an unprecedented heatwave is modulated by local disturbance. Science Advances 9(14):1-14.
Maucieri, D.G., and Baum, J.K. (2021). Impacts of heat stress on soft corals, an overlooked and highly vulnerable component of coral reef ecosystems, at a central equatorial Pacific atoll. Biological Conservation 262: 1-10.