FOREST ECOLOGY ON THE FRINGES OF SOCIETY

RESEARCH:

I focus at the intersection of 3 areas of ecology applied to forests:

September 2023: I have started a new post-doc position at USFS IITF, based out of Rocky Mtn Research Station in Fort Collins, CO. I am working with Eileen Helmer to investigate multiscale responses of Caribbean forests to hurricane disturbance.
August 2023: I attended ESA 2023 in Portland. What a meeting!
July 2023: I had a great time at the LTER SPARC: Producer-Consumer responses to disturbance working group at NCEAS in Santa Barbara. I was stimulating to work with ecologists from different ecosystems, backgrounds and perspectives to try to synthesize our understanding of how disturbances affect food web dynamics.

June 2023: It was a very stimulating experience attending the NEON-NCAR CTSM model-data synthesis workshop. An amazing group of colleagues gathered to run point simulations with CTSM at NEON sites. Check this paper for more information. A version of this workshop will also be presented at ESA (contact Will Wieder at NCAR for more information).

April 2023: The final chapter of my dissertation has been published in Plant Ecology: Intraspecific trait variation and species turnover in successional tropical forests: assessing trait imputation for community-weighted mean
My PhD dissertation is published on the FIU digital commons: link here

March 2023: Talk was given at the New Phytologist × ORNL Anthromes Symposium. Forest demography and the carbon cycle session: see the session recording here: 10.52843/cassyni.s4l2yj

March 2023: In collaboration with Jeff Warren at ORNL Climate Change Science Insititute and researchers from the University of Tennessee Arboretum in Oak Ridge, TN, we have published a paper in Geoderma titled "Functional variability in specific root respiration translates to autotrophic differences in soil respiration in a temperate deciduous forest". Here are the highlights:
- Root-system specific respiration rates (Rr) are related to root functional traits.
- Rr relates positively to root N content, diameter, and specific root area.
- A new method to measure root and soil respiration in situ was developed and used.
- Autotrophic soil respiration increased with SRL, tip abundance, and RTD.

Do you have leaf gas exchange data you want to archive so others can use them? Check out Kim Ely, Alistar Rodgers et al.'s reporting format. Links to their Github and example datasets are on the publications tab.