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.
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 Benjamin Filewod is a MSc student examining the impacts of a spring heatwave on leaf dynamics and canopy physiology of sugar maple. Ben's website |
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.  Kira Borden (co-supervised, Marney Isaac) is a MSc student examining the use of ground-penetrating radar in assessing tree rooting profiles. |
Katerina Kostyukova (co-supervised, Jay Malcolm) is a MSc student working on the spatial ecology and habitat preferences of small mammals in Central Ontario.
