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Natalie's research focuses on understanding interactions among competing individuals. The role of competition is especially important in forest ecology since interactions among trees shape the structure and function of these ecosystems. Mechanistically, resource competition among trees is well understood. However new insights from research in low diversity temperate forests emphasize the importance of species-specific, local-scale interactions in determining the success of individual trees. While it seems that these neighborhood effects may profoundly influence temperate forest dynamics, few studies have thoroughly quantified their role, in part because of the extensive data demands needed to decipher species- and spatially-specific phenomena.
To study neighborhoods (be they houses or trees), maps provide essential information. Maps exist for the tropics but they lack abundance in any one species to investigate the species-specific neighborhood approach, while in temperate zones field-mapped data is limited and employs only small plot sizes. The lack of data is not surprising, given the amount of labor and diligence required to collect it. Field mapping is made even more challenging in dense, steep, wet and buggy conditions of the northeast temperate forest. But as more tree species face increasing anthropogenic disturbance, maps are becoming vital. For the past four summers Natalie has been working to create three large (6-10ha) mapped tree inventory plots representative of the temperate northeast hardwood forest. |
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| van Doorn, N.S., J.J. Battles, T.G. Siccama, P. Schwarz, T.J. Fahey. 2011. Links between biomass and tree demography in a northern hardwood forest: A decade of stability and change in Hubbard Brook Valley, New Hampshire. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 41: 1369-1379. |
| Solomonoff, N. 2007. Forest biomass and tree demography in a northern hardwood forest: A decade of stability and change in Hubbard Brook Valley. Master's Thesis, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California at Berkeley. |
| Fonti, P., Solomonoff, N.; García-González, I. 2007. Earlywood vessels size of Castanea sativa records temperature before their formation. New Phytologist 173: 562-570. |
| Solomonoff, N. 2005. Creation and evaluation of a master chronology for Abies concolor in Sequoia National Park. Berkeley Scientific Journal. Volume 9, Issue 1: 39-42 (Spring 2005). |
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ESPM 102A: Terrestrial Resource Ecology (UC Berkeley; Fall 2007 & 2010) |
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