Terrestrial Ecosystems and Global Change

Research in the Taylor Lab centers around the responses of terrestrial ecosystems to various global change drivers and how those responses, in turn, feedback to influence the trajectory of global change. How will changing climate, CO₂ concentrations, nutrient inputs, and disturbance regimes influence plant production, resource acquisition, and community structure? Will plants grow larger under higher CO₂ concentrations, capture more carbon, and help mitigate human CO₂ emissions, or will increased plant growth be limited by some other resource? How do anthropogenic changes in disturbance regimes such as human land use, hurricanes, and invasive species influence carbon and nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems? How do we best incorporate answers to these questions into global Earth System Models?

To address these questions, our work operates at molecular, individual, community, and ecosystem scales. We strive to combine inference from controlled manipulative experiments, natural observational studies, and large-data syntheses to better understand the patterns and mechanisms of ecosystem responses to global change. This multi-scale perspective leads us to conduct work from lowland tropical rainforests to the Alaskan tundra.