My research focuses on plant and ecosystem responses to global change, include rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, altered climatic drivers such as temperature and precipitation, and changes in land use and community composition. My current research involves measuring forest-wide carbon, water, and energy exchanges over a northern hardwood ecosystem using both micro-meteorological and ecological techniques. This work allows us to quantify the carbon sink strength of these forests and to relate changes in this sink to climate variability and to ecological processes operating at the plant and soil level and across successional time. Previous work in my laboratory was aimed at linking above- and below-ground responses to increased atmospheric CO2 as a means of predicting the long-term ecological and evolutionary consequences of this perturbation. Both of these lines of research are central to understanding the ecological consequences of global climate change.