How can we reconstruct living and breathing ancient landscapes from fossil leaves?  

I think that leaves are a fascinating plant part because they can seem so mundane, and yet you can tie so much of how the world works back to them.  The atmosphere is made of oxygen cycled through leaves.  Animals need energy that leaves alchemize from sunlight.  The ground that we stand on is often made of decaying leaf bits.  Leaves are what block out the sunlight when a forest grows, and leaves can release enough water or generate enough heat to create localized climates when in great enough numbers.

Leaves are a part of life's fiber, and those fibers can be traced out, beyond the leaves, into the world at large, and lead to something of an understanding of how all these intersecting systems work.

I am currently most interested in using leaf functional traits in fossils as a means of understanding plant ecological strategies.  These are measurable leaf characteristics with known physiological or mechanical significance, and they are an excellent language for fossil leaves, with all their built-in uncertainties, to tell us about how plants once interacted with their environmental milieus.

I am also interested in the mechanisms of fossil leaf classification.  Current practice is to "morphotype" fossil leaves when a taxonomic designation is not immediately apparent.  This involves using a suite of leaf architectural characteristics to differentiate species without attaching any potentially misleading phylogenetic significance.  I think that there must be a trove of untapped information stored among all this leaf architecture data, and I am interested in working on extracting some of it.