Billings Lab
Terrestrial ecosystem ecology and
stable isotope biogeochemistry
What We Do
Our research investigates how forest and grassland biogeochemical cycling of carbon, nutrients, and water is influenced by climate, vegetation, nutrient availability, and natural and anthropogenic disturbance regimes.
We explore scales ranging from microorganisms to the whole ecosystem. As such, we invoke tools from a wide range of disciplines, including ecosystem ecology, ecophysiology, microbial ecology and soil science.
We quantify pools and fluxes of carbon and nutrients in soils and vegetation to assess how ecosystems respond to environmental conditions, often using isotopic signatures in biomass, soil organic matter, and multiple greenhouse gases to infer driving mechanisms.
Recent projects are helping us to understand the biotic drivers of soil structure. Increasingly, our work has become more spatially explicit, with the development of maps describing the phenomena we quantify.