Research

Current research in the lab fall into two major themes: (i) Plant-soil feedback and (ii) Eco-evolutionary dynamics.

Plant-Soil feedback

We aim to develop a conceptual framework to scale individual plant-soil interactions to plant communities. Some of the specific questions we address include:

  • Are there signatures of plant-soil feedback in community composition, spatial distributions and trait patterns which are distinguishable from other community assembly processes?
  • How does the spatial extent of soil conditioning by plants and plant response to the soil conditions affect plant coexistence?

Concept map showing feedback between plant abundance and soil condition with an exogenous driver of the soil condition

Eco-evolutionary dynamics

We aim to identify biological contexts in which evolutionary models cannot overlook ecological dynamics and ecological models cannot overlook trait dynamics. Some of the specific questions we address include:

  • How do we quantify the relative speed of ecological and evolutionary dynamics in empirical systems to determine when eco-evolutionary models are appropriate?
  • What are the ecological consquences of rapid trait evolution?
  • Is speciation categorically different when microbially mediated traits are involved?

Trait distribution of two species changing over time