John Battles

The goal of our lab is to know how and why forests change. Given the scope of human enterprise (e.g., pollution, land transformations, biotic additions and losses), many forest ecosystems are experiencing fundamentally novel challenges. In the face of this uncertainty, we need to understand the dynamics well enough to anticipate the likely direction and magnitude of responses. These insights must apply to forests in the real world with all the attendant complexities. Therefore robust, quantitative field studies form the core of my research program. The objective is to produce answers to pertinent questions that a physicist accepts as valid and that a naturalist acknowledges as authentic. Currently our research centers on three basic questions: 1) the interactive control of the disturbance regime on ecosystem processes; 2) the explicit effects of tree demography on community composition and ecosystem function; and 3) the mechanisms of resource capture and allocation in forests under conditions of multiple resource limitation.