Welcome! We are group of field ecologists who share an interest in understanding forest ecosystems. Specifically, we want to know how and why forests change. Robust, quantitative field studies form the core of our approach. Answering these questions is more than just an interesting academic puzzle. As a result of human enterprise (e.g., pollution, land transformations, biotic additions and losses), many forest ecosystems will experience fundamentally novel changes. In the face of this uncertainty, we need to understand the dynamics well enough to anticipate the likely direction and magnitude of responses.
In practice, we conduct field-based, context-dependent research that informs how real ecosystems respond to a changing environment. A major challenge is accounting for confounding influences when the experimental unit is large (e.g., the whole landscape) and the inferential reference is even larger (e.g., an entire region). Our response is to build robust analytical frameworks informed by careful and often extensive field measurements. We believe that our results must be relevant to resource managers and comprehensible to the public.
