My research program examines how soil-plant relations are affected by both natural and anthropogenic disturbance. Four basic principles guide my research and these are: 1. plant nutrients can be available or unavailable for uptake based on chemical characteristics and association with soil organic matter (SOM) which causes fluxes between these pools; 2. after uptake, nutrients are re-deposited in the soil as leaf litter which becomes SOM through decomposition; 3. decomposition is mediated by microorganisms which can be influenced by plant rhizosphere chemistry; and 4. disturbance is a stochastic ecosystem event, which causes temporal and spatial fluctuations in these ecosystem processes. Many research questions can be derived from these four basic principles. For example, if natural disturbance influences ecosystem processes, such as increased nutrient availability, how can we better emulate the effect in managed ecosystems? Another area of my research examines whether plant community dynamics reflect top down (litter) or bottom up (microbial) controls in different ecosystems and the temporal shifts of these controls after disturbance? I have focused primarily on the effects of disturbance and the rhizosphere chemistry of nitrogen (N) availability, but recently have been examining soil carbon (C) stocks, specifically black C (charcoal and biochar), and the interaction between C and N. My research has focused on disturbed forest soil ecosystems, but in the future I would like to examine agroforestry and ways of improving resource management through emulation of natural ecosystem dynamics
