Exploring Earth’s Dynamic Atmosphere and Ecosystems with Fossil Plants

I am interested in using fossil plants to better understand how climates and atmospheric composition have changed over geological time and how plant-climate interactions have evolved. Plants have a remarkable capacity to sense and respond to their surrounding environment making them ideal sensors and monitors of past and current environmental change. I am particularly interested in using the sensing capacity of plants to reconstruct the atmospheric changes associated with mass extinction events in Earth’s past and to document the impact of current anthropogenic climate change. I use herbarium archives, controlled climate experiments and long-term environmental monitoring data sets to calibrate plant responses to known climate and atmospheric changes. I am interested in integrating all of these different sources of information to develop and test fossil plant climate proxies and to better predict the likely consequences of future climate change.