School of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Washington State University

Grazing exclosure on the Wasatch Plateau, Utah

Research Projects

Phone: 509-335-8538

E-mail: rgill@wsu.edu

Understanding how ecosystems respond and recover from disturbance is a fundamental question facing environmental scientists, with bearing on natural resource management, environmental policy, and basic ecological theory. Dr. Richard Gill and his colleagues are examining the consequence of disturbance, ranging from the pyroclastic flows of Mount Saint Helens to subalpine meadows in the Rocky Mountains. Our lab and collaborators explore how ecosystems function and respond to disturbance and how to scale process-based ecosystem measurements to landscapes, regions, and continents.

                 The diversity of our research projects reflect the scope of the problems associated with disturbance and the strength of collaborative research potential within the Washington State University system. Three of our ongoing projects demonstrate how we use information from both natural and anthropogenic disturbance to understand ecosystem properties and functions:

Response of grasslands to past and future atmospheric CO₂

This research, in collaboration with researchers at USDA and Duke University, is designed to experimentally evaluate the consequences of rising CO₂ on nutrient cycles, soil carbon storage, and water availability with climate change.

Interactions between climate change and land use in the Rocky Mountains

We are conducting a suite of paleo- and experimental studies devoted to understanding the complex links between climate variability and carbon dynamics in subalpine ecosystems in the High Plateau region of the Rocky Mountains. We are particularly interested in understanding the interactions of climate anomalies and grazing on the movement of upper treeline into subalpine meadows.

Community and Ecosystem Recovery on Mount Saint Helens

We are exploring feedbacks between plants, herbivores, and soil nutrient cycling to understand what controls succession on the pumice plains.

 

These projects are designed to provide insights on basic principals of ecology as well as increase our understanding of the important feedbacks that structure ecosystems in a rapidly changing world.

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