The role of terrestrial processes in the climate system with an emphasis on vegetation and the global carbon cycle.
Research Area
I am interested in understanding controls on carbon fluxes between the land surface and the atmosphere at a wide range of scales, from leaves to continents. I use plant physiological knowledge to develop innovative computer models of how plants grow, compete, and die and thereby drive ecosystem dynamics. A principal focus is the development and application of a global model of terrestrial ecosystem dynamics to simulate historical and predict future vegetation distributions and productivity in order to better understand the role of the terrestrial surface in the global carbon balance and climate system.
While my main work concerns the development of process-based computer models, I also have projects growing real trees under controlled-environment conditions (e.g. temperature, daylength, and CO2 concentrations) and in the field in collaboration with the Sainsbury Laboratory and NIAB, respectively. I have also started a new collaboration with Forestry England to study mature trees in Thetford Forest, looking in particular at their resilience in the face of increasing threats from drought and high summer temperatures. The resulting data from across these scales are used to inform and test the models.
Project Interests
Areas of particular interest are the relevance of physiological diversity for ecosystem behaviour, linkages between carbon and water fluxes at landscape scales, the role of sink processes (e.g. wood formation) in controlling carbon uptake in plants, and the role of carbohydrate storage in mitigating environmental threats. I am very interested in how to represent different plant types (i.e. life form; physiology) in models, with an emphasis on individual growth, and how individuals interact with each other though competition and more broadly with their physical environment, including soils. Projects could be purely model development or have a strong experimental/field component, but in all cases should feed into the global modelling work.
