Peter Adler
Utah State University, UT·Ecology & Evolution
Climate is changing faster than many ecosystems can follow. Short-lived organisms such as annual plants and soil microbes can shift quickly, but long-lived ones like trees and the soils they build change over decades to centuries.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Plant Science & Agriculture
- Topics
ecosystem functioning
ecosystem acclimation
community-environment disequilibrium
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Test whether community-environment disequilibrium, the gap between the climate a community suits and the one it experiences, reduces primary productivity, weakens resistance to biological invasion, and lowers pollination services, using novel combinations of existing long-term datasets.
- Engage natural resource management agency personnel through online workshops to develop applications of community-environment disequilibrium in climate adaptation planning, producing a peer-reviewed paper and a practitioner guide.
- Develop a theoretical framework, with supporting mathematical and statistical tools, for the functional consequences of lags in ecosystem acclimation across time scales and levels of biological organization.
- Synthesize evidence on ecosystem acclimation from paleoecology, long-term observations, experiments and simulation models, covering physiological change, trait plasticity, species turnover, altered disturbance regimes and long-term soil change.
- Analyze long-term datasets for evidence that acclimation lags are already altering ecosystem functioning, identifying when, where and why climate-ecosystem disequilibria matter.
More about the research
The result is a growing mismatch between the plants, animals, microbes and soils that are present and the climate they actually experience, producing combinations never seen before. Research in this lab asks what those mismatches mean for how ecosystems work: how much carbon they fix, how well they resist invasive species, and whether they still provide services people depend on. Both projects attack this from the data and theory side rather than through new field experiments, and both aim to give land managers usable guidance.
Why it matters
Forecasts of forage for livestock, crop pollination, carbon uptake, invasive species spread and the fate of endangered species all assume ecosystems track the climate, yet many lag behind it. By quantifying how much that lag alters ecosystem functioning, this work could give natural resource agencies better grounds for climate adaptation planning, including decisions framed as resisting, accepting or directing change. Workshops with agency staff and a practitioner guide are planned to make the data directly usable.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Morgan Ernest
University of Florida, FL·Ecology & Evolution
Assess how novel conditions, including a warmer, drier climate and experimentally created species combinations, affect the ability to forecast mammal population sizes at the long-term Portal Project site in Arizona.
Stephen Keller
University of Vermont, VT·Ecology & Evolution
Reconstruct about 13,000 years of alpine plant community history at the species level using ancient DNA from lake sediment cores in the Adirondacks, Green and White Mountains, and Katahdin.
Matthew Bowker
Northern Arizona University, AZ·Ecology & Evolution
Determine what controls the functional biodiversity of biological soil crusts at a global scale, through standardized surveys of biocrust composition run at many international sites.
The school
Utah State University: 5 labs on PI Pages, $451M a year on research, 126 research doctorates a year.
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