In my research, I ask “How does the structure and function of terrestrial vegetation and microbial communities regulate large-scale biogeochemical processes?” As a global change ecologist, I focus in particular upon how ecological communities regulate land surface interactions with the atmosphere and with climate, from local to global scales. This is an important research area because the response of living communities to climate change is one of the largest uncertainties in predicting the future of climate on earth.

A fundamental challenge in global change ecology is in scaling from individual organs or organisms (such as leaves of trees, or microbial communities, where biological information is richest) to the landscape or ecosystem (where interactions with the atmosphere and climate are manifest). My group tackles this challenge using a range of tools from ecophysiology and ecosystem ecology, micrometeorology and atmospheric science, remote sensing and process-based mathematical modeling, and most recently, microbial meta-omics and bioinformatics.