Hi, you’ve reached the homepage of the Bradford lab group at Yale University’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Our research explores two main questions:
- How do plants and soil organisms respond to environmental change?
- How do these responses affect ecosystem function, especially the movement and storage of carbon in soils?
Why focus on carbon and ecosystems? Soils and plants store huge quantities of carbon. Disturbances that degrade ecosystems release this into the atmosphere – in forms such as carbon dioxide – contributing to our changing climate. But soils and ecosystems are much more than reservoirs for carbon – their health is directly tied to water purification, flood prevention, maintenance of biodiversity, and agricultural production. Understanding how and why plants, animals, microbes and soils respond to environmental change will therefore help us understand the consequences for human well-being, and how we might manage them.
We use experimental and observational approaches to investigate these effects of global change, both in the field and laboratory. We primarily work across forests and grasslands in the north and south of the eastern United States.
The overall goal of our research is to provide the necessary mechanistic understanding required for reliable prediction of global change impacts on ecosystems, and their likely feedbacks to the climate system.
LAB NEWS-SPRING. Congratulations to postdocs Robert Warren and Mike Strickland who start faculty positions this coming fall at Buff State (SUNY) and Virginia Tech. A number of our students are moving on too: Bhavya Sridhar starts a Ph.D. at Cornell; and Taylor Gregoire-Wright is going to India for a year and then returning to the School for a Masters degree. There are also new faces: welcome to Tom Crowther who joined in April as a postdoc associate. And we look forward to welcoming two new Ph.D. students, Dan Maynard and Noah Sokol, this coming fall semester.
