Research interests

• The effects of climate change on California ecosystems
• Ecosystem dynamics in the Sierra Nevada
• Climate controls on water, carbon, and energy balance of ecosystems
• Vegetation mortality thresholds
• Controls on species distributions

My research focuses on how much carbon is sequestered in the soil due to natural processes. I'm interested in linking small scale processes, like extra-cellular enzyme kinetics, to large scale environmental services, like soil carbon sequestration. To do this I develop soil microbial respiration simulations on both the micro and marco scales. My simulations and analyzes use a number of mathematical and computational tools including: cellular automata, partial and ordinary differential equations and statistical comparisons.