Forests play a pivotal role as carbon cycling and climate change with human activity. In the decades around the turn of the last century, healthy trees in intact forests converted about a quarter of human carbon pollution into new wood and soil. Some of the carbon that forests did not absorb stayed in atmosphere where it enhanced the greenhouse effect and destabilized earth’s climate. Resulting extreme weather in the form of heatwaves, droughts and strong storms stresses trees and has sparked extensive forest dieback. As dead trees decompose, microbes release stored carbon back into earth’s atmosphere. Exactly how will determine whether and when earth’s forest carbon sink becomes a carbon source making climate change even more difficult to manage.

My main areas of research expertise are in forest inventory analysis, wood decay mechanisms and ecological restoration for carbon sequestration. Most of my questions involve developing multilevel statistical models. For more information and relevant citations, see below.