I focus mostly on forests and their interaction with climate change. My key interest is in ecophysiology and functional ecology. To date, my research has been centered in the African tropics, where I have been studying carbon allocation and cycling of forests (Ghana and Gabon), as part of the Global Ecosystem Monitoring (GEM) Network. My current research looks at linking tree functional traits to drought resilience across wet-dry gradient in Ghana, typically investigating variations in leaf gas exchange and plant water stress. Looking to expand my research interests/boundaries, I seek to develop ideas to incorporate community ecology/macroecology and also overlap my research into other non-tropical ecosystems.

I am broadly interested in leveraging remote sensing and geospatial technologies to improve public land management. As a plant ecologist, I focus on studying how climate and land use drive variation in plant communities across landscapes and time. My research combines field and greenhouse experiments with landscape-level studies in order to untangle the mechanisms driving the observed relationships, including community interactions, plant-soil feedbacks, and ecophysiology. I am currently particularly interested in the potential to use remote sensing and machine learning to predict intraspecific variation at broad scales, and for results, when paired with understanding of the ecological implications of the observed variation, to improve land management practices. My previous research includes studying the impact of drought on plant-soil feedbacks in Missouri tallgrass prairies, and the impact of land use change on the distribution of native orchid diversity in northwestern Virginia.

I am an incoming botany and ecology PhD student from Canada, and I am primarily interested in forest ecology and plant hydraulic traits, both in tropical and temperate zones. I got my BSc in plant biology from the University of British Columbia, where I worked with Dr. Sean Michaletz to look at the global trends in plant photosynthetic temperature dependence. I am excited to learn more about plants and their wonderful interactions with the world!