I am a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Texas at Austin working under the supervision of Dr. Kenneth Young.  I reside in St. Louis, where I am affiliated with Ellen Damschen’s lab at Washington University.  My research focuses on understanding how land-use and climatic change alter the structure and function of terrestrial ecosystems, and, in turn, rates of ecosystem recovery.  I enjoy working on mountains, especially in the Neotropics, because they provide a natural experimental setting to study relationships between humans, plants, and environmental variability.  Below, I briefly describe my postdoctoral and dissertation research.

The origin­­­­ of alpine grasslands in the tropical Andean region has been debated for decades, however few studies examine the mechanisms controlling forest-grassland ecotone location.  As part of a long-term interdisciplinary collaborative project with U.S. and Peruvian scientists and the Peruvian Association for the Conservation of Nature, my current postdoctoral research asks: How do climatic, topographic, ecological, and disturbance factors modify rates and patterns of forest growth at the upper and lower timberline?  In Río Abiseo National Park, Peru, I will use permanent plot and remotely sensed data spanning a 20-year period together with vegetation transects to characterize the forest-grassland ecotone at stand and landscape scales.  By combining environmental monitoring with field experiments, I also plan to assess the relative effects of frost, soil physical and chemical characteristics, and cattle grazing on seedling establishment, growth, and survival in grasslands.  This research will shed light on species-specific responses to land-use legacies and climatic variability on equatorial mountains and illuminate the suitability of Andean timberline forests as indicators of climate change.

Land-use and land-cover change and increasing atmospheric deposition are contributing to unprecedented rates of environmental change on tropical mountains.  Yet, how these processes affect hydrologic and biogeochemical cycles remains poorly understood.  My dissertation research examined the influence of three widespread Neotropical land-cover types––montane forest, shade coffee, and pasture––on rain, fog, chloride, sulfate, and nitrate inputs to canopies and soils, as well as the implications of these interactions for environmental services policy in Mexico.  Results from my work show that canopy structure has an unequivocal effect on the quantity and quality of water delivered to soil.  My findings also reveal that seasonal and interannual precipitation variability and topographic complexity play an important role in determining the magnitude of land-cover differences.  Expanding on this work, I am now collaborating on similar research projects in southern Chile and Indonesian Borneo.