Research Projects
Under construction…
My research focuses on using plant traits to understand how plants have evolved and how they shape our climate. I am interested in interdisciplinary approaches using plant morphology, anatomy, and physiology with climate/environmental models and statistics.
Fern functional traits
At the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, I’m working on understanding fern evolution through plant functional traits. Ferns have a long evolutionary history dating back ~400 million years ago and at one point were the dominant flora across terrestrial landscapes. They have undergone 3 major speciation events, the most recent dated ~55 Ma in the early Cenozoic. This has been hypothesized as: 1) ecological opportunity and/or 2) climate change.
As angiosperms dominated early Cenozoic forests, ferns were competing with angiosperms by occupying new ecological niches, specifically an epiphytic habit. If these “new ferns” were inhabiting new niches, how differently do they function compared to older lineages? Today, ferns are the second most diverse plant group of vascular plants with approximately 10,000 different species. As diverse as ferns are, not much is known about their plant functional traits and how these data compare across the group.