RESEARCH:

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

Demographic
​Dynamics

Forests & Global Change

Plant Functional & Physiological Ecology

NEWS:

• 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.

• February 2023: In collaboration with Matthew Smith's Fungal Systematics Lab at UF (especially Michelle Jusino) and colleagues at CAS-XTBG Key Lab for Tropical Forest Ecology, we have a paper published in New Phytologist: "Root-associated fungal communities are influenced more by soils than by plant-host root traits in a Chinese tropical forest"  ​

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• 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.​