Dr. Amy Zanne

Amy Zanne is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist. Her research focuses on interactions among plants, microbes and insects, and how they affect carbon cycling under current and future projected climates. To explore these questions, she also studies ecological, evolutionary, and biogeographic determinants of species distributions by measuring physiological, morphological, and anatomical functional traits. She explores ecosystem-level consequences of differences in species and trait distributions, for instance, traits of plants, microbes and insects that most affect rates and forms of carbon release with feedbacks to the earth system. Currently, she has international field projects in Australia, Brazil, Chile and Antarctica and local field projects at Cary. Most recently, she is starting several projects. These include research in Brazilian Cerrado to determine the role of seasonal wetlands in storing carbon and releasing CO₂ and CH₄, as well as building a global network of networks and database of databases of plant-microbe interactions.