I am advertising a postdoctoral position in my new lab at Duke, to start as early as August 2026. If you are interested in how plant communities respond to climate change, please consider applying!

academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/30614

We found that fires were more severe in dense, spatially homogenous forests with high ladder fuels – characteristics more common on private industrial than adjacent public land.

Using a unique airborne LiDAR dataset, we identified and mapped individual trees across 460,000 hectares in the Sierra Nevada, an area which subsequently burned in five large wildfires including the Dixie Fire, the largest single fire in California’s recorded history.

Brandon Collins, Michelle Coppoletta, Scott Stephens and I have been working for the past three years to understand a consistent, puzzling pattern in wildfire data: that fires are more severe on land owned by industrial timber companies than on land managed by public agencies.

The model we develop therefore explains the amazing diversity of plant hydraulic traits observed in plant communities across the globe, and replicates patterns across precipitation gradients.

Specifically, variation in species' drought tolerance generates an emergent phenological division of the time between storms. When paired with a trade off such that drought intolerant species grow faster or are more fecund, there is no limit to the number of species that coexist.

By unifying ecophysiology and community ecology theory, we show that simple trade-offs can maintain a high diversity of plant hydraulic traits across a wide array of climates and plant types.