She is a freshwater ecologist interested in the processes that shape ecological communities across different spatial scales. For example, how do predator-prey interactions shape local communities? How do dispersal abilities of organisms shape community composition and species distributions? And how do these processes (predation and dispersal) interact to influence community structure? Shannon addresses these question using a diversity of approaches from extensive spatial and temporal surveys of aquatic communities to experiments that range from mesocosm-level to landscape-level manipulations.