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Causes of Ecological Change

Lead Scientist(s): Dr Winslow D Hansen

Many interacting fine-scale processes such as seedling establishment, tree hydraulics, photosynthesis, and mortality aggregate to shape how forests are affected by changing climate and disturbance at broader scales. As a result, accurate projections of future forest dynamics will require that we identify the most important of these fine-scale processes and explicitly represent them in models.

Our lab intimately pairs experiments and state-of-the-art simulation models to identify the fine-scale processes that are most likely to underpin global forest change and to develop a mechanistic understanding of how key processes operate under historical and future conditions.