Research topics

1) Effects of plant composition and diversity on community assembly, ecosystem functioning and ecosystem services. This has been a long-term field of interest, and was the topic of my PhD dissertation.

• 1991-2018: I kept my PhD field plots in California active until summer 2017, and they have provided a wealth of data on several sequential projects over the last 25+ years, particularly in collaboration with Jeff Dukes, at Purdue University.
• 2010-2018: I have participated in a variety of projects with colleagues from other universities, most recently arising from a 2010-11 workshop at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS), aimed at synthesizing the state of knowledge in this field and helping it move from the test plot to the real world.
• While my California field plots are no longer active, recent efforts have focused on using existing datasets to integrate biodiversity effects with other ecosystem drivers, as in this paper in Ecology Letters assessing carbon storage in Quebec forests.

2) Nutrient cycling in Pacific Northwest watersheds. My interest in riparian restoration, and its effects on salmon habitat and nutrient retention, started soon after I came to Western, while serving on the Board of Directors for the Nooksack Salmon Enhancement Association (NSEA), a local non-profit dedicated to restoring habitat for salmon in Whatcom County. Research in this topic has provided a series of projects for both undergraduate and masters students, including

• 2013-2016: research with the EPA-funded Whatcom County Agricultural Watershed Project;
• 2014-2018: collaboration with the Willamette Partnership to test models for assessing ecosystem benefits of riparian restoration;
• 2016-current: The Nooksack-Fraser Transboundary Nitrogen Project, a locally-motivated, globally relevant project to understand nitrogen sources, sinks and transformations in the lower Fraser River Valley, BC, Canada, and the adjacent Nooksack River watershed in Whatcom County, WA. This project is now the North American regional demonstration project for the International Nitrogen Management System.

3) Overgrazing and restoration of grasslands of Inner Mongolia, China. The work in Inner Mongolia arose from an invited workshop I attended at China Agricultural University, in Beijing, in 2010.

• I began collaborating with CAU Prof. Lin Shan and his then-graduate student Chen Qing, now an assistant professor at Tianjin Normal University.
• My Chinese collaboration has extended to working with Prof. Bai Yongfei at the Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing, where I spent two months in the fall of 2014 as a Visiting Senior Scientist.
• I hosted Prof. Bai and his post-doc Dr. Li Wenhuai as visiting scientists at WWU in the 2017-2018 academic year.