Ecologists and physiologists have long sought to understand how organism-environment interactions influence the distribution and abundance of species and the overall biological diversity observed across the biomes on Earth. As threats to biodiversity hasten from land-use and climate related changes there is an urgent need and growing interest in applying basic, but modern, approaches and novel tools towards enhancing our understanding about the interface between organisms and their environments – past, present and future. A central goal of researching this interface is using this understanding to not only deepen basic understanding about plant-environment interactions but to provide foundational information needed to mitigate the unprecedented impacts and losses to the Earth’s biota.
The Dawson lab research group applies the tools of physiological and evolutionary plant ecology, ecosystem science, stable isotope biogeochemistry as well as remote sensing and modeling towards the study and interpretation of the plant-environment interface. Investigations cover a wide array of study systems, organisms, and questions and draw upon a variety of empirical and theoretical methods merged with the application of diverse approaches (observations, monitoring, and experimental manipulations) as avenues for improving our understanding of how the ecophysiological characteristics of plants are shaped by and respond to the environments they inhabit. Projects pay special attention to how aspects of plant form and function combine to permit adaptation to environmental variation, whether naturally or anthropogenically imposed, and how plants and their unique traits influence the structure and function of the communities and ecosystems they compose or that they have membership with. In the past several years many more projects are being structured around global climate and land-use change as foundational themes. These and many other themes outlined above provide the intellectual rationale for the studies we undertake.
