A dominant and critically important theme of research in our group is focused on the ecological and physiological characteristics of plants, how these characteristics permit plants to cope with diverse or even extreme growing conditions, and the impacts these characteristics have on the communities and ecosystems these plants inhabit.
While projects of this nature have in the past explored this theme of research with the objective of learning how the ecophysiological adaptations plants possess permit their “fit” to the natural environments they have come to inhabit, in recent years we have structured some new projects in ways that are focused on exploring species-level responses to the major environmental changes that are occurring on Earth today, particularly land-use and climate changes.