Our lab's research is about interactions between environmental change (especially climate), plants and animals, and people.

We often (but not always) make use of "natural experiments" by delving into time series and spatially distributed data to look at how systems respond to different environmental changes and variability through space and time. Powerful computing (GIS, remote sensing, statistical and mathematical models) and massive archives of remote sensing, climate data, and "citizen science" biological observations are cornerstones in this approach.

Complementing this, more insights can come from mechanistic approaches based on first principles (e.g. physical relationships) and experimentation (e.g. field experiments). In some of our projects we get a chance to use these approaches too, often with collaborators.

We've looked at implications of environmental change on birds, mammals, plants (from rare endemics to invasive weeds), evapotranspiration, topo- and micro-climate diversity, and protected area assessment, and more recently, urban areas. Projects generally focus in the Western US, but we’ve also worked in China and Nicaragua, Central America.