"Looking Back Over 30 Years of Ecology in the Tropics"
537 Heller Hall and Live stream
We are all too aware of the looming environmental and social crises of biodiversity loss, climate change, land-use change, and pollution. It can be challenging to maintain hope, both personally and professionally in the face of the many threats to the planet. In this talk I will review highlights from my 30-year career working in tropical ecosystems. Our projects include work to document rooting depths of different plant life forms, and modeling and field studies of secondary forest succession. These studies illustrate the roots of ecological understanding; in essence, how tropical dry forests are put together—but they do not amount to much if they are unconnected from other fields or potential applications. I will then discuss how we can build interdisciplinary bridges that connect different fields of inquiry and practice. We are living in challenging but exciting times, and forging a new, collaborative science and practice of conservation, restoration, and ecology is one way to cultivate care for our planet.
About the Speaker
Dr. Jennifer Powers is a Full Professor in the Department of Plant Biology and Microbial Biology at the University of Minnesota and currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Biotropica, which is the journal of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. She received her PhD in Biology from Duke University in 2001 and then completed postdoctoral studies at the State University of New York- Stony Brook and the University of Minnesota. Her research program focuses on understanding how land-use and climate change affect biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem processes, and plant communities seasonally dry tropical forest landscapes, which are spectacular ecosystems but also highly threatened. Her lab includes graduate students from Costa Rica, Colombia, Vietnam, Tanzania, and the United States. In addition to using scientific approaches to studying tropical dry forests, her lab embraces using art as a way to connect ecology to society, and she never goes to the field without a journal to sketch what she sees.