Coastal marine communities are changing rapidly resulting from a combination of local (e.g., coastal development) and global (e.g., climate change) factors.  The Yeager lab seeks to understand the factors regulating marine communities under environmental change to both advance process-based models in predictive ecology as well as inform effective conservation and management strategies.   Specific areas of research include: habitat fragmentation effects on biodiversity, terrestrial-aquatic food web subsidies, testing models of hierarchical community assembly, coastal landscapes under global change, and macroecological controls on functional diversity. We combine field experiments, observational field surveys, and large-scale data synthesis to study the structure and function of a variety of coastal habitats including mangroves, seagrass, salt marsh, oyster reef, and coral reef habitats.