Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

My work on climate warming manipulations blend scholarship, project management, technical innovation, and multidisciplinary collaboration to investigate various questions regarding the impacts of climate change and disturbance at individual, community, ecosystem, and landscape scales.

My current project at SERC is the Coastal Wetland Carbon Sequestration Temperature and CO₂ Manipulation Experiment (with Patrick Megonigal, Peter Thorton, Paul Dykstra, Matt Kirwin, and others)

The future sink strength and carbon stock stability of coastal wetlands is uncertain because global change drivers such as temperature and elevated CO₂ perturb the complex biotic and abiotic feedbacks that drive high rates of soil carbon sequestration. Our objectives are to quantify how warming affects the stability of large coastal wetland soil carbon pools, the ability of coastal wetlands to maintain contemporary rates of carbon sequestration, and interactions between temperature, elevated CO₂, and inundation frequency on soil carbon dynamics.  My work on this project will include designing the experimental treatments, including the fabrication and implementation of free air above- and below-ground feedback control heating and C0₂ enrichment for the first time in a tidal wetland, along with ongoing data management, statistical programming, data analysis, and the integration of climate data with biological measures of response.