Research

The overall goal of our research is to provide the necessary understanding for reliable estimation of global change and management impacts on ecosystems, their feedbacks to the climate system, and to develop understanding that informs [more] sustainable management of agronomic and environmental services. 

Four key facets of our work tie together all that we do:

1. We focus on how biology and ecology influence how ecosystems work;

2. This ecological focus demands that we integrate local-scale variation in organisms and their microenvironments into our research, to ensure that their influence is not obscured at the regional-scales for which we want to generate understanding and make projections;

3. We increasingly work in managed forests, recognizing that management decisions critically influence the sustainability of these systems and the multiple functions and organisms they support;

4. We want to quantify the true size of effects of controls, meaning that our philosophy of study design and inferential analysis is constantly being developed and refined to provide numbers that are meaningful to scientists, policy makers and land managers alike.

Please see the drop-down pages to explore further the general themes that tie together the research of the lab. And check out the Yale Applied Science Synthesis Program, where we are working with others to produce evidence syntheses to inform management of agricultural lands, grasslands and forests for improved human and environmental outcomes.