I am an ecosystem ecologist with broad interests in other related fields of ecology and Earth System Science. I study the patterns, mechanisms, and consequences of vegetation-environment interactions, especially in the context of novel climate regimes under the on-going global change. Answering this question requires consideration of fine-scale plant ecophysiology (e.g. organism-level regulatory mechanisms), large-scale land surface processes and element cycles (e.g. terrestrial carbon-nutrient-water-energy nexus), and key ecological and evolutionary processes linking these questions across scales (e.g. competition, acclimation, and adaptation).
To this end, my research program uses process-based ecosystem models as 'numerical greenhouses' to integrate the ever-increasing heterogenous data sets in ecology (e.g. synthesis in traits, ground census, flux tower, and remote sensing) and to conduct experiments that help to answer the above questions. I have worked extensively in the tropics, including tropical moist forests in Panama and the Amazon, dry forests in Costa Rica and Thailand, and savannas and woodland in more arid tropics. My research also extends to temperate forests with a focus in leaf phenology.
