Gaining a better understanding of carbon (C) dynamics across the terrestrial and aquatic landscape has become a major research initiative in ecosystem ecology. Wetlands store a large portion of the global soil C, but are also highly dynamic ecosystems in terms of hydrology and N cycling, and are one of the most invaded habitats worldwide.…
This work represents an interdisciplinary collaboration among Paige Fischer (project leader), with training in sociology and human geography; Seth Guikema, an engineer with expertise in climate-driven hazards and human decision-making regarding risk; Gretchen Keppel-Aleks, a climate scientist at UM Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, who focuses on modeling climate impacts on vegetation including forests…
We recently had a paper accepted in Ecological Economics, led by Hui Xu, a recent PhD student advised by Dan Brown in SEAS. The research assessed the trade-offs in the abatement of phosphorous runoff into Lake Erie that could be gained with different land uses that have less P runoff than fertilized cropland, versus the…
Mondrian is a computer model of wetland community and ecosystem ecology (Currie et al. 2014, Ecological Modelling 282: 69-82). Its main strength is that it spans four levels of organization in a unified, integrated fashion: (1) individual plants and their physiology; (2) population-level processes including fecundity and mortality; (3) community-level processes including competition among native plant…
We recently began a new NASA-funded project, continuing the work with a large collaborative team to link land use, socioeconomic drivers, and climate to the hydrology and water quality in large-river watersheds and the effects on Great Lakes coastal wetlands. In past work, the Michigan team developed the Mondrian model of community-ecosystem processes to better…
John Graham, who completed his PhD degree at Michigan in 2016, was lead author on a new paper just published in Landscape Ecology. In this work, John used landscape ecology methods to assess whether perennial bioenergy crops like switchgrass or prairie grasses, if used in a large agricultural watershed in Illinois, could improve landscape-scale habitat…
