I am interested in how plants interact with each other and the environments they grow in. Subarctic and arctic ecosystems are generally characterized by low microbial activity and nutrient availability and the plants there have adapted to these harsh environmental conditions.
With my research supervised by David Wardle, I want to find out how vegetation of alpine tundra will react to an increase in soil nutrients that is likely going to occur due to global drivers such as climate change and atmospheric nitrogen deposition.
While most past studies have only considered the direct effects of fertilization on tundra vegetation, I aim to decouple the effects of increased nutrient availability from indirect effects through species turnover.