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My research investigates the processes that underlie patterns in plant community dynamics, structure, and function, combining experiments in the field, mesocosms, and greenhouse, field surveys at scales from centimeters to kilometers, and modeling to integrate results across approaches and scales. In many cases, we use invasive species as model systems to investigate basic questions in community and ecosystem ecology. Current projects include studying the relative importance of different pathways by which plants interact, with emphasis on “nontrophic” mechanisms that integrate ecosystem processes and community dynamics. We are finding that such mechanisms are very important in some communities and they can considerably modify expectations from classic community theory based solely on coupled consumer-resource interactions. A second important focus is the role of clonality in understanding plant communities. Almost all persistent herbaceous plant communities (grasslands, wetlands, tundra) are dominated by clonal organisms, yet clonality has been studied largely from the point of view of individual plants (e.g., foraging behavior) rather than population and community dynamics. Using wetland vegetation as model systems, we are using both mesocosm experiments and highly-parameterized simulation models of real communities to test hypotheses about the attributes of clonal plants that lead to success. A final set of projects involve mining large data sets from our own data or the literature to investigate questions about the relative roles of neutral and niche processes in community dynamics and how these processes can be combined and integrated.
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