Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

John Parker joined the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center as a Senior Scientist in September 2007. Parker first earned a Bachelor's degree in Environmental Sciences from UVA in 1993, after which he worked as an Environmental Consultant for 2 years. Parker then completed a Master's degree with Emmett Duffy and JJ Orth at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, where he worked on biodiversity-ecosystem function in seagrass beds in the lower Chesapeake Bay. Next, after a 2-year stint as a diver and technician at the NOAA marine lab on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Parker completed a PHD in marine and freshwater chemical ecology at Ga Tech working with Mark Hay. One of the highlights of this stop was doing a 10-day mission as an aquanaut on the Aquarius, the world's only undersea research habitat. Parker then conducted a 1.5yr postdoc at Cornell University working on freshwater and terrestrial plant-herbivore interactions with Anurag Agrawal. 

In September 2007 Parker started a new program in Terrestrial Ecology at SERC, where his research program examines how global change affects plants, associated food webs, and ecosystem processes. Parker's research is hypothesis-driven and spans multiple habitats, including temperate forests, coastal mangrove forests, and agricultural systems. Most projects use long-term experimental manipulations of plant communities and global change drivers to predict current and future impacts to these communities. Key advancements include renewed emphasis of biotic resistance to non-native plant invasions by native herbivores, documenting the threshold effects of extreme climate on mangrove performance and distribution, and the establishment of North America’s first and largest tree diversity-ecosystem function experiment.

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