My overarching research goal is to understand the ecological and evolutionary processes that lead to spatial patterns across scales of biological organization. In my thesis, …
Inland waters (lakes, rivers, reservoirs, wetlands) are the largest natural source of the greenhouse gas methane, representing 40-50% of total emissions. Emission sources are characterized …
Detecting minerals and determining their compositions is fundamental for reconstructing thermal and chemical evolution of the lunar crust. Estimating Mg-Fe composition of mafic minerals and …
Lyme disease affects hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. While treatable if caught in time, the disease is associated with massive annual healthcare costs. …
Global forests are a large and dynamic carbon stock. Biological processes such as photosynthesis, respiration, and mortality control fluxes of carbon into and out of …
Exposure, weathering, transport, deposition, and diagenesis have profound effects on sediment on planetary surfaces and the final, observable geologic record. This thesis constrains the ways …
The northern high latitudes are currently experiencing some of the fastest rates of environmental change on Earth, including reductions in sea ice extent, melting of …
Water-rock reactions affect the evolution of planetary crusts and largely control their potential for habitability and biosignature preservation. Here we use data from remote sensing …
The next few decades are expected to host a reinvigoration of planetary exploration by humans. The most likely targets for near-term human exploration include the …
Organic matter is present on many bodies in the solar system. The parent bodies of carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, for example, are known to contain a …
Feedbacks between Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere may accelerate or slow climate change over this century. This uncertainty exists because two dominant land-atmosphere feedbacks …
The Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral reef ecosystem, is subjected to a number of global and local stressors, including tropical cyclones. Although tropical …
Diverse hydrous minerals have been identified on Mars and suggest a rich history of water-rock interactions in a variety of aqueous environments. Fe/Mg clays and …
Dryland ecosystems were considered the most diverse in the Hawaiian archipelago. Today, less than 5% of original dryland habitat remains. Although contemporary wildfires and the …
This work is perhaps the first major study integrating mineralogical and morphological properties of lunar impact melt deposits using the new generation remote sensing data. …
One of the ubiquitous impacts of climate change on the terrestrial ecosystem is the shifting plant phenology, which is the periodic events in the life …
The climatic history of Mars has been indirectly studied through the remote detection of minerals produced by chemical alteration across its surface. While the martian …
The history of Mars’ paleoclimate is explored using sedimentary records from both the Noachian and Amazonian periods. Sedimentary structures indicative of a progradational delta are …
A suite of lunar materials is examined with reflectance spectroscopy. Reflectance spectroscopy is capable of collecting compositional data for planetary surfaces at high spatial resolution …