I have long been interested in the interplay between human land use and ecosystem services, dating back to my youthful observations while growing up on a family ranch in Montana. I chose to pursue my undergraduate degree at Duke University in large part due to the research opportunities available there. My undergraduate research experiences included work on elevated CO2 effects on forest soils in the NC piedmont, revegetation of a restored coastal plain wetland, seed dispersal in a tropical dry forest, climate warming effects on the red fir/white fir ecotones of Sequoia National Park, and the impacts of nitrogen air pollution on plant communities and soil biogeochemistry in the Colorado alpine. Through these experiences and my doctoral research, I have grown ever more fascinated by the biogeochemical responses of the soil ecosystem to human-caused environmental change.
My dissertation research focuses on the long term impacts of land use change on ecosystem carbon (C) cycling and storage. I work at the Calhoun Experimental Forest, a 50-year-old loblolly pine plantation in the South Carolina Piedmont where researchers have sampled soils and trees regularly since forest establishment in 1957. The Calhoun's archived soils and data present a unique opportunity to quantify above- and belowground carbon sequestration of an economically and ecologically important ecosystem. My research looks at shifts in C storage within and among C pools over 50 years—0-60cm soil organic carbon (SOC), leaf litter, coarse woody detritus (CWD), and living tree biomass. This research is important and unique in that it adds to and synthesizes a wealth of detailed data collected over the 50 years from forest establishment in 1957 through canopy closure in the 1990s, to pine decline and the onset of the next successional stage. Understanding each pool's contribution of carbon and uncertainty to the overall budget will help prioritize future sampling effort at the Calhoun, as well as inform sampling effort and targeting of pools for other landowners and managers who wish to estimate carbon storage in their forests. Long-term observations of carbon pool accumulation and decay, particularly accumulation and decay of decadally-cycling pools like CWD and SOC, are exceedingly rare. Data of this nature are critical to predicting forest C sequestration in coming decades as atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to rise, as well as for managing forests to maximize that sequestration.
For my future postdoctoral and eventual faculty research, I am looking to extend the scope of my human-ecosystem interaction research beyond managed subtropical forests. I am seeking a postdoctoral research position examining management and climate change impacts on ecosystem biogeochemical function, particularly the carbon cycling and storage functions of the soil system.
