Neotropical Climate and Biogeography

This research focuses on how climate and land-cover changes may affect vegetation and species distributions in complex tropical landscapes.  Collaborators include scientists from Oregon State University and Symmetry, Inc.  It develops user-friendly software to visualize the geographical locations and environmental distributions of vegetation physiognomies; generates spatially explicit climate data to model vegetation physiognomy, ecosystem processes, and species distributions; and it uses these data to answer ecological questions about Neotropical landscapes.