Land management impacts biodiversity, structure, and ecosystem function

Selective logging is often hailed as a land-use compromise. In my PhD research, I explored the impacts of low-level selective logging in Gabon. I investigated how selective logging - a widespread, but localized disturbance - can alter patterns of tree & liana regeneration, growth, and survival and shift composition, structure, and function of vegetation communities in a tropical rainforest. To do this, I set up a network of vegetation plots that measured seedling, sapling, and adult trees and lianas across a chronosequence of logged forest. 

Our initial vegetation censuses found that low-intensity selective logging had relatively small effects on understory forest structure and diversity (link), and that logged forests had some composition differences compared to unlogged forests, but didn't have negative impacts on key ecosystem services (link). 

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Environmental variation shapes plant communities

Abiotic variation impacts reproduction success and functional trait variability in plant communities. 

Currently, I am exploring how climate change affects tropical reproductive phenology (the timing of flowering and fruiting of tree species), and how shifts in phenological patterns can have cascading impacts in tropical ecosystems, affecting resource availability, impacting animal populations, and creating challenges for management and conservation of tropical forest ecosystems. 

Previously, I studied how climate affects plant communities by exploring trait shifts across climate & elevation gradients. In the Brazilian cerrado, I described how macroecological patterns of leaf trait variation across precipitation and temperature gradients. We explored how drip-tip incidence in Cerrado species is affected by climate and species distribution patterns (link). Additionally, I assisted in amassing a dataset of herbaceous plant traits across a climate & elevation gradient in the Gongga Mountains, Sichuan, China (link).

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Plant-animal interactions and ecological processes

  Photo courtesy of Liam Jasperse-Sjolander

Plant-animal interactions are important ecological processes that shape ecosystems in ways that can impact biodiversity, forest structure, carbon storage, and forest functioning

I have contributed to research investigating how the impacts of megaherbivores, such as elephants, can affect the structure and diversity of understory plants around elephant-dispersed tree species in Congo Basin forests (link). Previously, one of my first research projects explored how the seed fate of a bird- and monkey-dispersed species (Virola surinamensis) impacted reproductive success on BCI in Panama (link).