Research and scholarship
Research and scholarship
My research interests are primarily to do with the ecology of individual trees, in particular tree growth and seed production. One long-term project, following the seed production of beech trees across England, has been running for 30 years and now has the longest continuous dataset. Another project is looking at the seed production and seedling establishment of Scots pine in wetland situations. I am also involved in a project on modelling forest growth for silvicultural management. Further afield, I am part of an international team linking the sulphur content of tree rings to that in soda straws (speleothems) from a cave in Italy, ranging from a consideration of pollution over Europe to mapping sulphur in tree rings at the sub-micron scale using the synchrotron at Grenoble.
I also continue an interest in the effect of fire on vegetation and have two long-term projects running, one looking at the effect of grazing and fire on the world’s northern most cactus population in northern Canada (running since 1993), and the other following cohorts of cacti as they cope with desert grassland fires in Arizona (running since 1987). I am part of the Research Institute for the Environment, Physical Sciences and Applied Mathematics (EPSAM).
Public understanding of science is also important to me and I have written a number of articles and books on tree and woodland ecology aimed at the non-specialist.