Community responses to simulated climate change

From 2001-2015 I collaborated on a watering experiment comparing the effects of alternate scenarios for climate change in northern California. In 2007 we published the finding that short-term, direct responses to altered climate were overridden over time by community-level responses. Thus, where species interactions are sensitive to altered climate, they have the potential to drive ecosystem responses.

In 2009 we established a new experiment to test the hypothesized mechanism of our original results. We are in the process of preparing several additional publications based on the final years of data collection from this project.

This work was supported by an NSF LTREB and the UW-L College of Science and Health. It was carried out at the UC Angelo Reserve in collaboration with my UW-L colleague Tim Gerber and with Blake Suttle; please see Collaborators links for more information.