Climate change and forest communities
Climate change is leading to unprecedented ecosystem shifts. We investigate the causes and consequences of these changes.
Forest disturbance interactions under climate change
Forest disturbances have dramatic impacts on forests—in some cases, creating opportunities for growth and renewal, in other cases, causing forests to cross environmental thresholds. While disturbance impacts have long-been studied, how disturbances interact with each other remains poorly understood—in part because these relationships are incredibly complex. My co-authors and I had a lot of fun over the past year and half wrapping our heads around disturbance interactions and how they are shifting in response to climate change. Full paper coming out this fall!
Causal inference and climate change attribution
Our causal inference framework for climate change attribution in ecology paper is almost out! Building off of an approach I used in a recent paper published in Nature Communications, my collaborators and I developed an accessible, step-by-step guide for rigorous quantification of climate change impacts in natural systems. See preprint here and replication code here.
Predicting ecosystem tipping points
Ecosystem transformations are occurring around the globe. At high elevations, alpine tundra is giving way to subalpine forests and at lower elevations, conifer forests are transforming into shrub-dominated systems. Where and how fast these transformations will occur under climate change remains poorly understood. Building off of a recent paper (winner of the ESA ECS Outstanding Paper Award), I am working with an interdisciplinary team of scientists to investigate threshold dynamics and tipping points in CA ecosystems.
Species conservation in the Sierra Nevada
In 2020, I published a paper in Ecosphere that showed > 50% of sugar pines in Sequoia-Kings National Park had died in the past 20 years and not nearly enough seedlings were recruiting into mixed conifer forests to slow this dramatic decline. To understand whether sugar pines in Yosemite are facing the same fate, I am leading a project focused on measuring the combined effects of white pine blister rust, drought, and fire to predict the future of sugar pines under climate change and shifting disturbance regimes.
