Associate Professor Emerita
About
Professor Burnham received her Ph.D. in botany at the University of Washington in 1987. Her dissertation was on "Inferring vegetation from plant-fossil assemblages: effects of depositional environment and heterogeneity in the source vegetation on assemblages from modern and ancient fluvial-deltaic environments." Research was carried out in tropical forests of southern Mexico (Tabasco) and in the state of Washington in coal mines of the Puget Group. Her master's degree was also received from the University of Washington in 1983 on foliar morphological analysis of the Ulmoideae (Ulmaceae) from the early Tertiary of western North America. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980.
Research interests
Professor Emerita Burnham is currently involved in research on woody climbing plants (lianas) of the Amazon Basin, particularly in northcentral Brazil. Previous work was focused on lowland Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia at the base of the Andes Mountains. Her interests are in the community structure and species composition of Amazonian forests, as viewed via the lianas and vines that inhabit these forests. The broader interests of her lab is focused on the impacts of human intervention in Amazonian forests from oil exploration, agriculture, and gold mining. Robyn Burnham has ongoing research at the PDBFF (Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project) north of Manaus, Brazil. Research questions there focus on the biodiversity and population structure of close to 400 species of lianas in continuous forest where she has measured all liana stems over 1cm in diameter on the ForestGEO plot. In addition, she is sampling the 1, 10, and 100 hectare reserves and their isolation corridors for comparison with continuous forest.
In Michigan, she has established a 23-hectare liana plot in the "Michigan Big Woods" ForestGEO network. It is one of the few temperate plots of its size with all climber stems measured, tagged, and mapped by species to exact locations. Minimum size of mapped vines is 1cm, but a species list of all vines of all sizes is recorded for each 20 x 20 m cell within the 23 hectares.
Link to ForestGEO
Museum of Paleontology website
Research Areas(s)
Affiliation(s)
- Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences
- University Herbarium
Field(s) of Study
- Conservation and Status of Protected Areas in Tropical South America
- Fragmentation and the Effect on Liana populations of Brazil
- Liana Traits, Geographic Distributions, and Ecology
Graduate students
