Forests contain two thirds of terrestrial biodiversity and store as much carbon and is currently in the atmosphere. We are combining new abstractions of forests, with various sources of data, via Bayesian statistics, to produce useful, predictive models of forest dynamics.
Our work in forest dynamics includes a number of projects, involving a number of international collaborators, spanning scales from the stand, through regions, to the globe. Throughout, the focus is on developing accurate, predictive models that could be usefully applied to improve our understanding of, and ability to manage, the world's forest resources.
Forest Dynamics are a major focus of the research of Mark Vanderwel and Drew Purves in CEES.
Drew Purves on Modelling Forest Dynamics:
mms://wm.microsoft.com/ms/research/MSRC/eitr/Forest_Dynamics.wmv
- Silvia Caldararu, Paul Palmer, and Drew Purves, Inferring Amazon leaf demography from satellite observations of leaf area index, in Biogeosciences Discussions, European Geosciences Union, October 2011
- Caspersen, John P., Vanderwel, Mark C., Cole, William G., Purves, and Drew W., How stand productivity results from size- and competition-dependent growth and mortality, in PLoS ONE, vol. 6, no. 12, pp. e28660, 2011
- Drew Purves and Mark Vanderwel, (book chapter in press) Traits States and Rates: Understanding Coexistence in Forests , in Forests and Global Change, Cambridge University Press, 2011
- Emily R Lines, David A Coomes, and Drew Purves, Influences of Forest Structure, Climate and Species Composition on Tree Mortality across the Eastern US, in PLoS-One, vol. 5, no. 10, PLoS, October 2010
- Rosie Fisher, Nate McDowell, Drew Purves, Paul Moorcroft, Stephen Sitch, Peter Cox, Chris Huntingford, Patrick Meir, and F. Ian Woodward, Assessing uncertainties in a second-generation dynamic vegetation model due to ecological scale limitations, in New Phytologist, vol. 187, no. 3, pp. 666-681, August 2010
- Jeremy W Lichstein, Jonathan Dushoff, Kiona Ogle, Anping Chen, Drew W Purves, John Caspersen, and Stephen W Pacala, Unlocking the forest inventory data: relating individual-tree performance to unmeasured environmental factors, in Ecological Applications, April 2010
- Daniel Montoya, Drew W Purves, Itziar Rodriguez, and Miguel A Zavala, Do species distribution models explain spatial structure within tree species ranges?, in Global Ecology and Biogeography, August 2009
- Drew Purves, The demography of range boundaries vs range cores in Eastern US tree species, in Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B, vol. 276, pp. 1477-1484, 25 February 2009
- Nikolay Strigul, Denis Pristinski, Drew W Purves, Jonathan Dushoff, and Stephen W Pacala, Scaling from trees to forests: tractable macroscopic equations for forest dynamics, in Ecological Monographs, vol. 78, no. 4, pp. 523-545, November 2008
- Drew W Purves, Jeremy W Lichstein, Nikolay Strigul, and Stephen W Pacala, Predicting and understanding forest dynamics using a simple tractable model, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 29 October 2008
