Margaret Evans

I am a broadly trained plant population biologist who works across scales to understand and predict the impacts of climate variability and change on forest health, forest carbon dynamics, and biodiversity. That is, I study the scaling of climate stress, from physiological mechanisms and homeostatic reactions, to the demographic fates of individuals, to population dynamics and evolutionary strategies, to consequences at ecosystem and global scales. I approach this challenge of scaling with a set of tools collectively known as “ecological forecasting”, for example, combining different data in Bayesian models and iterative, near-term validation of model predictions with new observations, to improve the prediction of ecological state variables (e.g., carbon per hectare) and services (e.g., timber production, climate regulation via carbon sequestration). In particular, I use tree-ring and forest inventory data as complementary sources of information in models at scales ranging from individual trees to forest stands to tree species’ geographic distributions and the North American continent.