The Catano Lab

Understanding the interrelationships between biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and the services nature provides to people is a fundamental challenge for both scientists and practitioners. Accelerating environmental change is complicating this by leading to novel assemblages of species and ecosystem states. To resolve these challenges, my lab works across the interface of fundamental and applied ecology, leveraging concepts and techniques from community ecology, global change biology, and biodiversity conservation. Our research combines field and trait-based experiments with plants, cutting edge quantitative approaches, and syntheses of biodiversity data from a wide range of ecosystems including grasslands, wetlands, and forests.