I study productivity and carbon cycling in terrestrial ecosystems.  Specifically, my research addresses contributes to three general questions:

How will changing climatic conditions influence plant productivity in terrestrial ecosystems?

How might carbon storage and cycling in terrestrial ecosystems be altered in the future, potentially providing a feedback to the global climate system?

How do human land use and land management practices influence both productivity and carbon cycling?  

I focus on understanding the large-scale and long-term impact of changing climatic conditions and land management practices on primary production and carbon storage and cycling. My approach combines results from manipulative and observational experiments with simulation modeling, remote sensing and GIS to scale these insights from plots to landscapes and regions.

Human society relies on services from terrestrial ecosystems both directly, for timber and agricultural products, and indirectly, for carbon storage, water cycling, recreational opportunities, etc. Modifications to either the function or distribution of terrestrial ecosystems could substantially impact the viability and sustainability of these services. Climate change, altered disturbance regimes, land use patterns, and biological invasions are generally accepted as the primary components of global change that will impact terrestrial ecosystems.

The potentially dramatic consequences of global change for terrestrial ecosystems has drawn substantial attention to these processes and lead to a wealth of results from observational and manipulative experiments. However, important challenges remain, including synthesizing results to predict the large-scale and long-term response of terrestrial ecosystems to the combined components of global change, and bridging the gap between measurements that occur at plot scales and policy decisions that occur at large scales. 

Updated: March, 2011