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Our recent work has shown that lightning has significant consequences in tropical forests — by disproportionately killing the largest trees, it has an outsized influence on carbon storage and biodiversity. With lightning on the rise due to climate change, understanding the effects of lighting will be critical to managing and regrowing tropical forests in a way that maximizes carbon storage and forest health.

Stressed Out Soils examines how five common environmental stressors and human activities — drought, warming, fungicides, antibacterials, and pesticides — interact to shape soil health in grassland ecosystems.

The Gigante project will learn when, where, and why giant tropical trees die, in order to better manage forests and the global carbon budget.

While unprecedented federal, state, and private resources are available to address the wildfire crisis – the scope of the problem is so vast that spending must be targeted to ensure multiple goals are met using the best science.

For more than 35 years, our team has been studying the complex interactions between variable acorn production, rodent populations, and ticks that carry Lyme disease. Our goal is to understand the environmental factors that influence Lyme disease occurrence, in order to predict when and where risk is greatest to humans, to guide public health interventions.

The degree to which nutrients limit the tropical carbon sink remains unclear, especially in forests recovering from agricultural land use.

One promising tool in the quest to fix our planet’s climate is to reforest tropical lands that have been degraded, letting the trees soak up and store some of the atmosphere’s extra carbon. However, a tropical forest’s ability to grow back depends on nitrogen fixation.

In order to grow, thrive, and trap carbon dioxide, forests need nutrients. Our lab is working to understand how deficiencies in nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus impact forest growth and carbon sequestration. We’re also exploring the other side of the coin: What tools and strategies do trees have to overcome nutrient limitations?

EarthX is a collaboration of school district teachers and educators, scientists, and education researchers helping to bring Earth science and compelling environmental phenomena into high school Biology, Chemistry, and Physics courses in Baltimore.

Our lab intimately pairs experiments and state-of-the-art simulation models to identify the fine-scale processes that are most likely to underpin global forest change and to develop a mechanistic understanding of how key processes operate under historical and future conditions.

One of our goals in the Forest Futures Lab is to advance theory on how cross-scale interactions shape forest-landscape trajectories. We combine remote sensing, experiments, and process-based modeling to characterize how and why forest landscapes have changed in the past, project how forest landscapes may change in the future, and evaluate potential approaches for people to steward forest landscapes toward more sustainable trajectories.

With an international network of collaborators, we are leveraging theory, new global data-streams, ecosystem models, and machine learning to build and apply a framework for scaling effects of changing climate and disturbance on key forest processes, from individual trees to biomes.

Embedding Molecular Biology in Ecosystem Research (EMBER) will enhance predictions of how forests will cope with future droughts and fires, and help to better protect and manage these valuable ecosystems.

The Urban Biodiversity Futures (UBF) Research Coordination Network is building a multi-disciplinary community of researchers and stakeholders to reconceptualize how urban biodiversity is understood, and to define a research agenda that supports just, resilient urban biodiversity conservation.

In three cities in the Hudson Valley — Kingston, Newburgh, and Poughkeepsie — Defining Urban Biodiversity is documenting how adding, removing, and connecting areas with tree canopy influences the types of animals in each green space, how they interact with each other and plants, and what this biodiversity might mean for people living nearby.

Wouldn’t it be powerful if we could predict ecological events — such as harmful algal blooms or rising risk of tick-borne disease — with the same accuracy that we can forecast next week’s weather? Shannon LaDeau is working with quantitative and disciplinary methods to advance the field of ecological forecasting.

In an effort to reduce climate impacts, support biodiversity, and make cities more livable, many city governments across the US are investing in expanding and connecting their natural ('green') spaces. Shannon LaDeau is working with communities and urban planners to better understand how these initiatives influence what plant and animal species are present (biodiversity), how that biodiversity affects people, and how resilient these communities are in a changing climate.

The Hi-RISE project is working to understand the ecology of Himalayan glacier-fed rivers — including bacteria, fungi, algae, and invertebrates — and how biodiversity and water quality will change as glaciers continue to disappear.

We are working to understand where carbon is stored across ever-wet and seasonally wet grasslands — and when and where greenhouse gas emissions are most dynamic — in targeted Cerrado areas in and around Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park in Goias, Brazil.