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Biography
Hi, Welcome and thank you for your interest in my research. When I was thirteen years old, I was fortunate enough to travel with mother and Rotary International to Costa Rica to deliver wheelchairs. I returned to the United States with a tape worm, but also a fascination for tropical ecosystems and their biodiversity that lingers to this day. Fast forward to my undergraduate years at the University of Denver as a pre-med student. After visiting the hospital on several occasions, I realized that medicine was not for me, and I promptly switched majors to Ecology. After graduating, I went to Puerto Rico for a volunteer internship measuring trees. It was 6-month commitment, but I ended up staying 5 years, researching the beautiful forests of the island, measuring countless trees and learning how to do ecological science at the Luquillo LTER. I guess that is why the call Puerto Rico, "La Isla del Encanto".
I have witnessed first-hand the devastation that climate change can have on forests. Around the turn of the century, several abnormally warm years led to the outbreak of the mountain pine beetle in my home of Summit County, Colorado. Over the span of a decade, several thousand acres of forest were decimated, leaving behind a tinderbox of standing dead lodge-pole Pine trees. This completely changed the landscape and ecosystems of Summit County, and climate change will continue to impact and shape the forests of the Mountain West and the globe. These two experiences act as the driving forces behind my research, which focuses to understand the ecology of tropical forests in the Anthropocene. Research FociForests Demographics: To know how forests will change (or not; which is an open reserach question), we have to understand how they work as biological systems. Forests are complex systems, especially tropical forests, which can harbor thousands of plant species per hectare. I seek to better understand how tropical plants survive, grow, compete for resources, and reproduce; and how these processes affect tropical forest ecosystems. Uncovering the mecahnistic controls that underlie tropical forest demographics, and how the controls scale to the ecosystem level is a major motivation for my work.
The Effects of Wind Disturbance on Forests: Concurrent with changes to the Earth's climate, anthropogenic climate change is expected to strengthen the intensity and increasing the frequency of severe cyclones (typhoons & hurricanes). Thus, the effect of wind disturbance on forests will continue to be an important agent of forest disturbance, succession and recovery. I am interested in understanding how wind disturbance interacts with the environment and other agents of change in forests (e.g. increasing temperatures, changing precipitation regimes, etc.).
The Functional and Physiological Ecology of Trees: Not all plants are created functionally equivalent. The diversity of form and function in plant life has interested the scientific mind for centuries. A comparative approach that quantifies how plant form relates to physiological function has great utility in linking the variation in plant form to ecologically-meaningful differences among and within species.
Root Biology: Roots are fascinating. If you disagree with me, then I encourage you to grab a shovel, step outside, and dig just below the soil surface in a vegetated area to have a look at what you find. Chances are you will unearth a variety of things; perhaps, an earthworm or two, and an engtanglement of root systems, potentially with some associated fungi and soil microbes. Biologically, roots function in a many ways simultaneously to interact with the soil to nourish the plant and absorb water. Some of my work seeks to understand these interactions in context, and help find rules that govern them.
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