Juan 3:16 ∴ Carpe Vitae

RESEARCH:

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

Demographic
​Dynamics

Forests & Global Change

Plant Functional & Physiological Ecology

NEWS:

Picture
  • December 2024:  New work is out in Plants, People, Planet - "Anthromes and forest carbon responses to global change".  Incorporating an Anthromes (i.e., Anthropogenic biomes) perspective with CMIP6 carbon climate feedbacks, we show how recent past tropical forest land carbon stocks are uniquely vulnerable to global change.   Human population pressures, including land use trends are greater in tropical than temperate forests.  Acknowledging and harmonizing competing resource demands (including conservation and land carbon storage) in the tropics is key to the global forest carbon sink. Modeled (CMIP6) land carbon stock sensitivities to CO2 and temperature (1900-2023) were greatest for tropical wildland forests (areas without significant permanent human presence/impact), potentially illustrating their vulnerability to global change.  Results were robust across the nine Earth System Models used in our analyses of carbon climate feedbacks, yet results should be understood in the context that it is very difficult to model tropical forest land carbon stocks. Thanks to ORNL Biology and Environment and the New Phytologist Foundation for putting on a symposium on that greatly stimulated my thinking on this topic. 
  • October 2024:  In collaboration with Jason Vlemickx, Simon Queenborough and Liza Comita (Yale) and folks at the Yasuní Forest dynamics plot in Ecuador (Renato Valencia, Nancy Garwood and Margaret Metz), we have a second study published in Ecology Letters which demonstrates the negative effects of warming (increasing nighttime minimum temperatures) and increasing relative humidity on tropical tree reproduction. The study demonstrates that the convergence of warmer nights and wetter atmospheric conditions occurring during the flowering phenological year and the onset and peak of the fruiting season have negatively impacted seed production over the past two decades.
  • August 2024: I attended the Ecological Society of America meeting 2024 in Long Beach, CA.  I presented a poster on my ORISE post-doc work: "Hurricane disturbance and the growth-mortality trade-off of Caribbean trees".  Stay tuned for more on this project. 
  • July 2024:   In collaboration with Paul Furumo (lead author) and Eric Lambin from the Stanford Doerr School for Sustainability, a paper has been recently published in PNAS titled, "Land conflicts from overlapping claims in Brazil’s rural environmental registry".   We use the Brazilian CAR (Cadastro Ambiental Rural) to assess land-conflict in the Brazilian Amazon finding that conflicting land claims are more prevalent on larger land parcels, in more densely settled areas, and in areas with less secure land tenure.  We show deforestation occurs more frequently these areas of conflicting land claims resulting in an overestimation of forest reserves by up to 9.7 million hectares when considering double-counted and deforested areas of reserves.  This work documents a widespread, overlooked form of Forest Code noncompliance and how self-declaration of land tenure is inadequate to decrease conflicts.  Harmonizing competing land claims is key to conserving the Brazilian Amazon and its vital forest carbon sink.
  • June 2024:  Another paper has been published in Ecology & Evolution entitled Intraspecific variation in Janzen-Connell effect is mediated by stress and plant-soil feedbacks. This work in in collaboration with the forest ecology group at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, China. The study uses Pometia pinata (Sapindaceae) seedlings and soil from two populations to examine how plant-soil feedback strength varies within species and in relation to water availability, light availability, and seedling density.  Plant-soil feedbacks were weaker in low moisture and high light treatments than in high moisture and low light conditions, and plants had weaker defenses in their natively sourced soil relative to soil sourced from other populations.  
  • March 2024:  We have a paper published in Ecology & Evolution from a seedling-transplant drought experiment at the Luquillo LTER, led by David Matlaga at Susquehanna University.  We analyzed seedling survival in relation to  functional traits of seedlings along an experimental soil moisture gradient in a tropical wet forest finding that species with relatively conservative traits (e.g., high leaf mass per area), had higher survival at low soil moisture whereas species with more extensive root systems were more sensitive to soil moisture.  Pictured right: Bob Muscarella and (at the time master's student) Roel Lammerant (co-lead author of the study) - Uppsala University. 
  • January 2024:  Work form my post-doctoral time at Jeremy Lichstein's lab at the University of Florida Department of Biology (in collaboration with Grant Domke - USDA Forest Service NRS, Dan Johnson also at University of Florida and Kai Zhu at University of Michigan) is out in PNAS: Climate change determines the sign of productivity trends in US forests.               See UF news and U Michigan news releases.   
​
  • November 2023:  In collaboration with Jason Vlemickx, Simon Queenborough and Liza Comita (Yale) and folks at the Yasuní Forest dynamics plot in Ecuador (Renato Valencia, Nancy Garwood and Margaret Metz), a recently published study in New Phytologist documents the negative effects of warming (increasing nighttime minimum temperatures) and increasing relative humidity on tropical tree flower production.