Our Research Philosophy
We believe that important scientific advances and actionable strategies to solve pressing environmental issues requires a pluralistic approach that appreciates both variability and generality, yields mechanistic insights and makes useful predictions, and reveals the fundamental processes that regulate ecological dynamics and patterns from local to global scales.
Our projects span a wide range of questions to understand the processes that structure the assembly, distribution, and resilience of ecological communities, in both natural and managed ecosystems. Our research combines field and trait-based experiments with plants, analyses of spatial and trophic networks, multi-scale remote sensing and geospatial modeling, and syntheses of biodiversity data from a wide range of ecosystems including grasslands, drylands, and forests.
Landscape-scale Grazing Experiment
Understanding how conservation grazing using domestic cattle alters the distribution and diversity of plants.
Disturbance & Recovery Across Global Grasslands
Assessing the generality of factors influencing grassland responses to disturbance and nutrient inputs.
Rainfall & Drought Experiment, Pinyon Flats
Examining how variation in drought and rainfall influences plant community dynamic and ecosystem functioning.