Nina Wurzburger
University of Georgia, GA·Ecology & Evolution
Human activity is changing wildfires, storms and plant diseases, and these altered disturbances can permanently flip a landscape from one type of vegetation to another, such as forest to shrubland. Such flips are hard to predict.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Plant Science & Agriculture
- Topics
ecology
alternative stable states
state shifts
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Quantify how sensitive forest-to-shrubland transitions are to repeated wildfire and Phytophthora ramorum disease, using an 18-year monitoring network in coast redwood and mixed evergreen forests.
- Identify biogeochemical and disturbance feedbacks that weaken forests and stabilize shrublands, using shrub–tree competition experiments that manipulate soil nutrients and other resources.
- Predict where and when persistent forest-to-shrubland state shifts may occur across heterogeneous landscapes by combining epidemiological and forest dynamics models with field data.
More about the research
Most past studies showed that shifts were permanent, not where on a landscape they are likely to occur. This project asks how repeated fire and an introduced plant disease interact to push coastal forests in the western United States toward shrubland, and where forests are most vulnerable.
Why it matters
Forest and fire managers, tribal communities and policymakers in western U.S. coastal regions could use maps of where redwood and mixed evergreen forests are most likely to convert permanently to shrubland. This could help them target disease control and fire management to protect vulnerable forests. A publicly shared two-decade dataset will support further research.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Christine Goodale
Cornell University, NY·Ecology & Evolution
Use long-term data from four Hubbard Brook monitoring sites to quantify how tree carbon allocation above and below ground has changed with shifts in soil nitrogen and phosphorus and their uptake by plants.
Yu-Ping Chin
University of Delaware, DE·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure how stemflow, the rainfall channeled down tree trunks to the soil, changes across a transect running from healthy coastal forest to saltwater-killed ghost forest.
Frank Jones
Oregon State University, OR·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether feedback between adult trees and same-species seedlings shifts from negative to positive as drought and nutrient stress increase, mediated by fungal pathogens and mutualists.
The school
University of Georgia: 27 labs on PI Pages, $628M a year on research, 598 research doctorates a year.
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