Maintaining earth’s diversity of vascular plants is dependent on the survival of plant communities locally, which are increasingly influenced by anthropogenic disturbance and climate change.   There is a pressing need to identify the factors that influence plant communities at multiple scales, and to understand what tools can be employed to maintain plant diversity for the foreseeable future.

Our lab leverages tools from Ecology, Geography, and Molecular Biology to address questions that transcend these disciplines.  This includes :

• Fine-scale multispectral remote sensing to understand local processes
• Field experiments into landscape-level models of disturbed ecosystems
• Metagenomics to understand microbial communities and soil processes