My postdoc research in the BEAST Lab at University of Maine explores conservation challenges for plant communities above treeline through a paleoecological perspective on subalpine and alpine vegetation in the Northeast United States. Alpine plant communities here are isolated by topography and a patchwork of federal, state, NGO, and private management; I’m leading collaborations across management jurisdictions to identify climate refugia and refine climate change vulnerability assessments. I co-organized the 2020 virtual Symposium on Climate Change in Maine’s Mountains and I co-guest edited a Special Issue of Northeastern Naturalist inspired by our symposium.
In the Primack Lab at Boston University, my PhD research documented a pattern of weakened phenological sensitivity in northern plant populations compared to conspecifics in southern New England: from sites at the coast to the interior of Maine, shifts in leaf out and flowering measured from contemporary, experimental, and historical data matched the direction, but not the magnitude, of changes noted in Massachusetts. I analyzed floristic change from the 19th to the 21st century on Mount Desert Island, Maine and placed this extraordinary flora in the context of floristic change across the northeast. At the end of my PhD, I began exploring phenological mismatch in trees and understory wildflowers. I’m continuing this research with TREETIME collaborators at the Morton Arboretum.
I was a field assistant and photographer for the Plants of Baxter State Park Project in 2012-2014.
As a master’s student in the Field Naturalist Program at University of Vermont, I worked with the Appalachian Mountain Club to assess a citizen science program monitoring alpine flower phenology. We published this work in Biological Conservation. At UVM, I also co-authored a Landscape Assessment for the LeDuc Farm property in South Burlington, Vermont.
In 2007, I worked as a canopy biodiversity research assistant with The Nature Conservancy in Washington’s Ellsworth Creek Preserve. My team compared arthropod biodiversity levels between old growth and young stands in the Willapa Hills.