Who's who:
Sean Thomas (PhD Harvard, 1993) is the lab Principle Investigator, and has been preoccupied with the comparative biology of trees and forest responses to the intentional and accidental impacts of humans for some 25 years. Sean has been at the University of Toronto since 1999, and is currently appointed as Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Forests and Environmental Change.
Our research focuses on how trees and forests respond to human impacts - intentional impacts through forest management, and unintentional impacts via local, regional, and global changes in the environment. In this effort, we try to link an understanding of functional ecology and ecophysiology of trees ("how trees work") to patterns of growth, mortality, recruitment, reproduction, at the population scale, to patterns community composition, and to ecoysystem processes, in particular carbon flux ("how forests work"). The lab is currently involved in projects in temperate and boreal forests in Canada, and tropical forests at a variety of sites.
Current lab members and projects:
|  Michael Fuller (PhD Univ New Mexico, 2004) is a post-doc on the SFMN post-harvest mortality project. Mike is interested in spatial processes and analysis of forest communities, and the application of theoretical ecology to applied problems in forestry.
M Fuller's website |
 Michael Drescher (PhD Univ Wageningen, 2003) is a post-doc on the Haliburton Forest mega-plot project, examining tree senescence effects on forest dynamics and the spatial dynamics of natural enemy effects. This work builds on Michael's prior field experience (in South Africa, Bolivia, France, and Canada) on trophic interactions and their role in vegetation spatial dynamics and succession.
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|  Hilary Thorpe (co-supervised, John Caspersen) is a PhD student working on documenting and modeling responses of black spruce ecosystems to partial harvests in the Lake Abitibi Model Forest in northern Ontario.
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 Rajit Patankar (MSc, Univ of Alaska 2005; co-supervised, Sandy Smith) is a PhD student working on interactions between canopy-dwelling mites and tree gas-exchange and growth dynamics.
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 Liz Nelson (MSc, Univ of Toronto Botany 2006) is a PhD student working on dendrochronological and dendrochemical approaches to quantifying effects of rising carbon dioxide on boreal forest dynamics.
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 Adam Martin (MFC, 2006, Univ Toronto Forestry) is a PhD student working on age-related changes in light requirements of tropical trees in Dominica and Panama.
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 Fraser Smith (co-supervised, John Caspersen) is a MSc student, with a project on mortality following structural retention harvesting at the farthest north extension of operational forestry in Canada, in the Yukon Territory.
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 Erin Mycroft is a PhD student working on polypore fungi as agents of tree decline in nothern hardwood forests.
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 Gordon Miller (co-supervised, David Balsillie) is a PhD student (on leave) as well as Ontario's Commissioner for the Environment. Gordon's academic work focuses on the policy aspects of forest carbon sequestration, with specific reference to Ontario.
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