Our research group studies how environmental and climate change affect the carbon and water cycles of forests, grasslands, and shrublands of the mountain West. We investigate 1) how living things are affected by biological, physical, and chemical factors, 2) how living things modify their environment, and especially 3) processes that control cycling of carbon, water, and nutrients within ecosystems. This work is interdisciplinary, merging basic science approaches from ecology, hydrology, atmospheric science, and geochemistry. We use a combination of field observations and instrumentation, manipulative experiments, and modeling.

We are scientists who study the biophysical factors that control Earth's carbon and water cycles, and how these cycles are being modified by environmental change. We are primarily focused on the land-atmosphere exchange of energy, water, and carbon dioxide, in forests, grasslands, and arid lands that experience seasonal snow cover. Our work is interdisciplinary, merging basic science approaches from ecology, hydrology, physics, and geochemistry. In recent years our focus has become increasingly computational, mining existing Earth system datasets with statistical learning and modeling.