Thomas first worked with Operation Wallacea in Honduras in 2009, when he joined the expedition as a undergraduate dissertation student in Cusuco National Park. He returned as staff in 2011 to lead the terrestrial invertebrate research, and has since completed his masters and PhD research in Cusuco. Based at Imperial College London, Thomas’s PhD research studied arthropod communities in the tropical montane cloud forest canopy. Canopy arthropods are poorly studied, especially in montane tropical forests, and little is known about their diversity and landscape-scale community ecology. Thomas’s research employed next-generation bulk DNA sequencing to generate community data from a highly diverse taxon, examining the extent of species turnover over elevational gradients and the possible impacts of climate change on this specialised community. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum, London, as well as the Senior Invertebrate Scientist for the Cusuco expedition.
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