Plant community ecology
Plant Community Ecology
My research is mainly focused on plant coexistence mechanisms. I am interested in the relative merits of neutral and niche theory, and in particular, what kinds of niches are plants likely to have? Some of my work has focused on competitive interactions, particularly how plant traits, such as seed size can influence the outcome of competition. However, more recently I have also been involved in negative feedbacks between plants and the soil community. This has led me to believe that such feedbacks are also important drivers of plant communities and can be strongly stabilizing. Recently, I have been interested in developing simple methods for analyzing plant growth. This takes the form of fitting simple non-linear functions in R but also developing more mechanistic models that include the interdependency of growth and flowering.
Research topics
Plant community ecology
Plant growth
Plant defence
Hemi-parasitic plants
Plant-soil feedbacks
Interdisciplinary
Organic farming
Selection experiments with Arabidopsis
Modelling growth of Arabidopsis
