Ongoing and potential Research Projects

mountain pine beetle

The mountain pine beetle has devastated millions of acres of pine forest in western North America. Surface atmosphere fluxes from these forests will be determined by the severity of the attack and rate of forest recovery. Ongoing projects with the McGlynn Lab in the Tenderfoot Creek Experimental Forest (TCEF) seeks to quantify the impacts of the outbreak on the surface-atmosphere flux of carbon, water and radiation before, during and after insect outbreaks.

flux synthesis

Biosphere-atmosphere exchange research is taking a strong turn toward synthesis as more and more eddy covariance data are integrated into regional and global databases and projects including AmeriFlux, NACP, and FLUXNET. These projects build toward the forthcoming NEON and IMECC/ICOS databases: synthetic flux research will be with us for a long time. Existing projects seek to quantify the mechanisms underlying interannual variability of surface fluxes, the role of landcover change on surface temperature change, the seasonality of photosynthesis, the impacts of direct versus diffuse radiation on C exchange, and a syntheses of existing (and forthcoming) Arctic flux observations.

Scaling ecological observations

All research challenges in Ecology and Earth Science are problems of scale. Do the observations that we make as Ecologists hold at larger scales in time and space, and do global model predictions describe well the behavior of the land surface at smaller scales in time and space? Both upscaling and downscaling involve some transfer of information, for which tools from Information Theory are appropriate. The most likely distribution of an unknown quantity is that which maximizes Shannon’s Information Entropy given available information (Jaynes, 1957). We are exploring techniques from Information Theory including Maximum Entropy approaches for ecological scaling.

multiscale flux reserach in arctic ecosystems

The legacy of the ABACUS project will be an extensive, open dataset of multiscale ecological observations from arctic ecosystems near Abisko, Sweden and Kevo, Finland. This dataset includes measurements from leaf chambers, automated chambers, branch bags, sapflux instrumentation, roving chambers, tower eddy covariance and aircraft eddy covariance. These observations can be scaled using remote sensing observations from handheld, tower, aircraft, and satellite platforms. Extensive opportunities for synthesizing and modeling ABACUS data are available.

Forecasting future forest function

Forests of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE) are faced with a multitude of threats including insect herbivory, pathogen outbreaks, fire, a changing climate, and land use change. These factors are often researched individually, but rarely in unison to forecast future forest community composition and ecosystem function over relevant time scales of human management and ecological succession. Tackling the challenge of forecasting forest function with an acceptable range of uncertainty requires extensive historical and modern datasets, climate and hydrological projections, and models, like ED2, that can resolve both community succession and ecosystem function.

Theory for irrigated agriculture

A project that I would like to begin involves sustainable water resource management in irrigated dryland agriculture of the sort that makes up some 30% of Montana’s agricultural output. Depleted aquifers and declining snowpacks necessitate conservative water use both now and in the future to sustain economic output and agricultural productivity. Recent research from the lab of Amilcare Porporato integrates irrigation scheduling into an existing ecohydrological framework (noted here). Testing theoretical predictions in a field setting can ideally maximize productivity and economic gains while minimizing water use.