Principal Investigator, Senior Scientist
Research Labs
Phone
443-482-2210
Staff Profile
Biography
McGill University (B Sc. In Biology)
University of Virginia (MS. In Environmental Sciences)
University of Georgia (Ph. D. in Ecology)
Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies (postdoctoral fellow)
Geoffrey (‘Jess’) Parker has been the forest ecologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) in Edgewater, Md., since 1987. His research interests concern the structure and function of forest ecosystems at long temporal and large spatial scales, in the canopies of forests, the spatial relationships of forest trees, and in comparative forest ecology. An organizing theme of the majority of studies has been the interaction between the structure of the forest canopy and: 1.) exchanges of material and energy with the atmospheric boundary layer, 2.) forest microclimates, and 3.) biotic habitats. He is currently involved in a variety of LIDAR-based studies of forest structure, eddy covariance-based measures of forest functions, and biometrically-based studies of forest carbon budgets.
Publications
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(2019). Persistent effects of fragmentation on tropical rainforest canopy structure after 20 yr of isolation . Ecological Applications, 29 (6) , e01952. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.1952
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(2019). On promoting the use of lidar systems in forest ecosystem research. Forest Ecology and Management, 450 , 117484-117484. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2019.117484
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(2019). Direct and indirect effects of climate on richness drive the latitudinal diversity gradient in forest trees. Ecology Letters, 22 (2) , 245-255. https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.13175
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(2019). Consequences of environmental heterogeneity for the photosynthetic light environment of a tropical forest . Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 278 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2019.107661
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(2018). Response to Comment on 'Plant diversity increases with the strength of negative density dependence at the global scale'. Science, 360 (6391) , aar3824-aar3824. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aar3824
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(2018). Long-term (33 years) rainfall and runoff dynamics in a tropical dry forest ecosystem in western Mexico: Management implications under extreme hydrometeorological events . Forest Ecology and Management, 426 , 7-17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2017.09.040
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(2018). Resilience of tropical dry forest productivity to two hurricanes of different intensity in western Mexico. Forest Ecology and Management, 426 , 53-60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2018.02.024
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(2018). Effects of hurricane disturbance on a tropical dry forest canopy in western Mexico . Forest Ecology and Management, 426 , 39-52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2017.11.037
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(2017). Canopy gradients in leaf functional traits for species that differ in growth strategies and shade tolerance . Tree physiology, 37 (10) , 1415-1425. https://doi.org/10.1093/treephys/tpx048
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(2017). What is the Point? Evaluating the Structure, Color, and Semantic Traits of Computer Vision Point Clouds of Vegetation . Remote Sensing, 9 (4) , 355. https://doi.org/10.3390/rs9040355
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(2017). Plant diversity increases with the strength of negative density dependence at the global scale . Science, 356 (6345) , 1389-1392. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aam5678
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(2016). Fine-scale patch mosaic of developmental stages in Northeast American secondary temperate forests: the European perspective . European Journal of Forest Research, 135 (5) , 981-996. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10342-016-0988-1
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(2015). CTFS-ForestGEO: a worldwide network monitoring forests in an era of global change . Global Change Biology, 21 (2) , 528-549. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.12712
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(2015). The importance of spatial detail: Assessing the utility of individual crown information and scaling approaches for lidar-based biomass density estimation. Remote Sensing of Environment, 168 , 102-112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2015.06.021
