Jalene LaMontagne
University of Missouri-St Louis, MO·Ecology & Evolution
New forests begin as seeds. How much seed trees produce, and in which years, shapes how forests regenerate after disturbance and respond to a changing climate.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Plant Science & Agriculture
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
mast seeding
seed production
plant reproduction
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Test how CO2, temperature, water availability, nitrogen deposition and wildfire interact to affect seed quantity, mass, chemistry and germination in five boreal conifers, including black spruce and jack pine.
- Combine herbarium cones dating to the 1820s, present-day range-wide collections and cones from an ecosystem-scale experiment to reconstruct how boreal seed production has changed over 200 years.
- Forecast boreal forest composition to 2100 by adding seed production into spatial landscape models spanning interior Alaska to eastern North America.
- Test how root traits and mycorrhizal fungal partners shape mast-seeding patterns such as year-to-year variability and time lags, using global databases (TRY, FRED, FungalRoot) and structural equation modeling.
- Integrate ten years of mast-seeding field data with global plant-trait and mycorrhizal databases to identify belowground drivers of plant reproduction.
More about the research
Yet tree reproduction is far less studied than tree growth, and most forest models treat seed supply as constant or ignore it. The lab studies what drives seed production in trees. One project focuses on how climate and other environmental factors affect seeds in North America's boreal forest. The other examines how underground traits shape 'mast seeding', in which plants switch between boom and bust years of seed production.
Why it matters
Forecasts of seed supply could help federal and state agencies, foresters and the timber industry plan for the future of boreal forests, which cover a large part of Earth's land. Because many forestry trees are inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi, learning how these fungi affect reproduction could help foresters develop more efficient ways to regenerate trees.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Elizabeth LaRue
University of Texas at El Paso, TX·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether higher tree species richness increases belowground biodiversity and thereby promotes complementary use of water and nutrients, using North America's longest-running large-scale forest biodiversity experiment.
Susan Kalisz
University of Tennessee-Knoxville, TN·Ecology & Evolution
Determine long-term patterns in arbuscular mycorrhizal and pathogenic fungal communities on native plant roots, and how invasion by garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) reorganizes them, using a long-term field invasion experiment.
Thomas Miller
Rice University, TX·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether Epichloë fungi are most beneficial to host grasses in stressful years, using 15–20 years of demographic data from a symbiont-removal experiment across seven grass species.
The school
University of Missouri-St Louis: 2 labs on PI Pages, $15M a year on research, 171 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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