Adler Lab
We are plant ecologists interested in explaining population and community dynamics in space and time. We study coexistence and patterns of diversity, the ecological impacts of climate change, and biological invasions. Much of our field work is in arid and semiarid ecosystems, but we also rely on statistical and simulation modeling techniques that apply to many ecosystems. Here are some of the questions we are excited about:
Biodiversity and coexistence
- Do competing plant species coexist stably? If so, what are the most important coexistence mechanisms in different kinds of plant communities?
- Does climate variability promote species diversity?
- What are the best methods to quantify coexistence mechanisms in nature?
- How do species richness and turnover scale in space and time?
Ecological impacts of climate change
- Does ecosystem functioning suffer when plant communities cannot change fast enough to keep up with climate change?
- What processes do we need to understand to predict the ecological impacts of climate change in the near, intermediate, and long-term?
- What kind of information do we need (demography, evolution, physiology, competition) to skillfully forecast the population-level impacts of climate change?
- How will species interactions mediate the impact of climate change on plant communities?
- How can land managers incorporate basic research results in their long-term planning?
Biological invasions
- How will climate change alter the trajectory of the cheatgrass invasion in North America?
- Can we combine remote sensing and causal inference statistics to quantify the impacts of invasion on ecosystem functioning at landscape scales?
1/2024: Peter took on a new role as Director of the USU Ecology Center.