James
Madison University, B.S., 1985
The College of William and Mary, M.S., 1989
University of Colorado, Ph.D., 1995
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| My
research investigates the determinants of plant biodiversity
in stressful environments, including salt marshes, ombrotrophic
bogs, and alpine tundra. I am particularly interested
in how belowground resources are partitioned between
different species within a plant community, allowing
for coexistence of species in a stressful habitat. From
this knowledge, I wish to establish predictability in
the responses of these plant communities to increases
in atmospheric nitrogen deposition from industrial processes
and rapid sea level rise due to global warming.
My approach
to these problems is reductionist in that I seek to
characterize each species within a plant community in
terms of its morphological, physiological, and reproductive
responses to variation in nutrient availability and
stress. This work involves measuring plant tissue nutrient
level, water status, photosynthesis, transpiration,
stress response, and symbiotic relationships with soil
microbes. It also involves characterizing the environment,
with measurements of soil resource availability, salinity,
pH, and waterlogging. I then scale individual species
responses up to the level of the ecosystem to understand
mechanistically how the community is assembled and to
predict how an assemblage may change in response to
anthropogenic disturbance.
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