Caroline Farrior
Modeling the pattern of plant distributions has proven to be a critical component in climate models. Plants species are constrained by physical limits such as cold and drought tolerance as well as competition from other species. Treating both types of mechanisms appropriately has been difficult to do while maintaining tractability for efficient use in climate models. Caroline is working on extending a new model of plant competition developed in the Pacala lab. This model has produced an accurate and tractable model of plant competition.
Caroline is currently extending and analyzing this model to understand the distribution of dominant plant strategies under the global range of climatic conditions (i.e. the biome distributions).