 |
Jason A. Lynch jallynch@life.uiuc.edu |
|
Research
Interests: My research interests focus on two different areas related to ecosystem change during the Quaternary Period. The first is investigating long-term ecological trends in fire regimes, vegetation processes, and rapid climate change. My current research emphasizes climate, vegetation, and fire interactions and how their spatial patterns affect ecosystems in the North American boreal forest during the Holocene. My future interests in the boreal forest include understanding the processes controlling modern and long-term charcoal accumulation, vegetation history, and sediment deposition patterns. To interpret the fire-vegetation-climate interactions I will use a multi-proxy analysis of terrestrial plant fossils (e.g. pollen and charcoal) to asses fire and vegetation patterns and stable isotopes and geochemistry to study post-glacial changes in available moisture from lake sediments. In addition, studies of charcoal production, accumulation, and transport from modern controlled burns will aid in understanding long-term charcoal accumulation. A further extension of this research will be to determine the importance of both fire and vegetation shifts to ecosystem change across the different biomes of North America (prairie, boreal forest, arctic tundra, and the eastern deciduous forest). I am particularly interested in examining how rapid climate change at the end of the last glacial maximum altered the distribution of plant communities and if disturbance mediated vegetation shifts. A goal of mine for the near future is to develop a North American charcoal database similar to the pollen database to be used for assessing broad-scale patterns in fire regimes. My second area of interest is to understand the effects of human-caused land-use changes on disturbance and vegetation at different temporal and spatial scales in the deciduous forests of North America. Specifically, I am interested in examining recent changes in disturbance regimes and vegetation composition and the consequences to soil carbon accumulation and nutrient dynamics on shaping the composition of present-day forests. Sediment geochemistry, pollen, and charcoal analyses with an integration of paleoecological data and global information systems (GIS) will be used to understand recent land-use changes. At long time scales, my research interests focus on the role of fire, vegetation, and soil processes in mediating past climate change in different forest communities since deglaciation, particularly the importance of fire in oak dominated forests. In doing so, I hope to understand the processes that shape the environment in order to better predict and manage the effects of human caused environmental changes such as global warming. |
|
||||
