RESEARCH

I’m interested in how functional diversity drives the provisioning of ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes in Africa. I'm particularly interested in the role that aboveground and belowground interactions play in determining the strength of the relationship between diversity and services. I'm keen on understanding this relationship at spatial scales that are relevant to farmers' land use decisions as well as the importance of threshold effects associated with land use change on these services. I am conducting my research through the Millennium Villages Project sites in Kenya, Tanzania, and Mali. I am co-advised by Cheryl Palm in the Tropical Agriculture Program at the Earth Institute.

Other work--past and ongoing--has been on the effects of climate and crop diversity on agricultural net revenue; the effects of CO2 and N on experimental grassland community composition and productivity; the production of CH4 in trees in northeastern forests; and the role of afforestation in urban parks on soil microbial community, carbon dynamics, and invertebrate diversity.