Integrating wetland ecosystem services into resource and land use decision-making is becoming increasingly commonplace as a mean to promote ecosystems health through political and community stewardship in conservation, and to build socio-ecological resilience to land-use and climate change. However, how to maximize ecosystem services through environmental management is still not clear due to a gap on our understanding of underpinning ecological processes that set regulating and supporting functions, and the relevant scales that these processes can be modeled and handled in practice.
My research focuses on understanding how the interplay between plants, soils, and water affects ecosystem functioning in wetland ecosystems and riparian zones. Specifically, I aim to understand the effects of heterogeneity in plant communities, physical structure, and hydrology in greenhouse gas fluxes and C sequestration. I also study what the most suitable scales (time and space) to represent the functional heterogeneity of these processes are. Answering these questions is relevant to improve our ability to represent C cycling in process-based models and parametrize these ecosystem functions at a whole-wetland ecosystem-scale, which is mainly the scale used by practitioners, resource managers, and climate modelers.
To answer these research questions, I use a diverse suite of measurements and observation techniques at different spatiotemporal scales, including hydro-meteorological monitoring; soil coring and dating; water, soil and plant C analyses; non-steady-state chambers to measure C fluxes, in-situ pore-water dialysis samplers, and plant surveying.
