Who am I?
My goal is to understand why do plants die under drought stress and find the key physiological factors that can predict when plants will die from drought.
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Some of these factors include the amount of water within living tissues of plants, the number of air bubbles in their vascular system, and the amount of sugars that plants have stored to use during times of stress.
I am also interested in the potential role that both fungal symbionts and parasites can have on either reducing or amplifying stress under drought.
Recent projects
Disease in plane sight
The oaks from Minnesota are being attacked by an invasive fungi that makes them wilt! We need a way to detect it across the landscape so that forest managers can control it. We are using visible and near-infrared technology mounted on a plane and machine learning algorithms!
Beam me up Scotty!
How cool would it be if we could tell how stressed a plant is and why by just looking at it? We killed a few oaks with the oak wilt fungus and with drought to test whether we can measure their physiology by just looking at how sunlight bounces off of them. This is called spectral ecophysiology.
The shape of you
We have been growing ponderosa pine seedlings from two different geographic areas in our greenhouse for a year. It's time to see which race can stand drought the longest without dying. Can we find common indicators of mortality risk between the two races?
Fungus among us
Plants are not alone out there. They are surrounded by a multitude of organisms. Some, like fungi, can help plants getting water and nutrients in exchange for sugars. These fungi establish networks that connect plants among each other. Turns out that these fungi can also spread stress among connected plants... How? Let's find out!
