A paper that Jaclyn co-authored with Mike Dietze proposing a new ecophysiological framework for including large-scale impacts of forest insects and pathogens in earth system models is now available online in Ecology Letters.
Insects and pathogens are the primary source of ecological disturbance in many global forests, potentially creating cascading land-climate feedbacks following disturbance. However, forest insects and pathogens are unrepresented in earth system models due to the lack of a general framework describing their impacts on plants. This paper is a first step forward in developing a generalized representation of these important ecological disturbances based on the direct ecophysiological impacts of insects and pathogens on plant carbon pools, that will allow us to better understand the large-scale role of forest insects and pathogens in shaping earth system processes.
The Matthes Lab at Harvard Forest 