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The lab's research focuses on linkages among plant community dynamics, primary productivity, and biogeochemical cycles,how these relationships are altered under global change, and how they vary across spatial scales.
Various ecosystem properties and processes, including hydrologic regimes, eutrophication, biodiversity, and homogenization of landscapes are likely to change in the future. These changes will have strong impacts on ecosystem services world-wide, and a major challenge we face is to predict future ecosystem states and services under complex global change scenarios. We combine field experiments, theoretical ecology, data synthesis, and process-based modeling techniques to understand processes driving community and ecosystem phenomena at various scales. Ultimately, our goal is to better understand and predict how communities and ecosystems interact, and how they will respond under global change scenarios at spatial scales relevant for land management. The lab's research revolves around three major components: (1) Plant community controls on net primary productivity (NPP) responses to altered precipitation regimes, (2) effects of global change drivers on biogeochemical processes, and (3) how asynchrony among local communities controls ecosystem processes at larger spatial scales. |
