Rebecca Montgomery

I have the honor and privilege to work with many types of collaborators, including students, staff, faculty, artists, and land stewards. Through field-based studies in tropical, temperate, and boreal forests, we collaborate to better understand plant response to environmental changes like fire and wind disturbances, warming temperatures, altered patterns of rainfall, and rising levels of CO₂. We recognize that people and land have been tied together since time immemorial and, therefore, the patterns and processes we study reflect and embody this interplay. 

Understanding the response of systems to environmental changes requires knowledge of the mechanisms through which organisms respond to the environment. Thus, we study the role of plant functional traits (e.g. photosynthesis, water loss, leaf anatomy, biomass allocation, allometry, growth, and survival) in forest ecology and in response to global change. We are interested in understanding how plants interact with and respond to their environments and the implications of these responses on forest dynamics, stewardship, people, biodiversity, and ecosystem function. 

Research in my lab spans from basic to applied, with the latter focused on meeting needs of land stewards in the Lake States, especially in Minnesota and for the Native Nations sharing that geography. I am also increasingly involved in community-engaged scholarship in collaboration with artists and social scientists. 

Current major projects study:

• the effects of global climate change on terrestrial ecosystems, including in the boreal temperate ecotone (B4WarmED), forested peatlands (SPRUCE), and tropical rainforest (Luquillo LTER);
• adapting forest management to climate change, including participation in two Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change network (ASCC) sites in Minnesota: the Cutfoot Experimental Forest and Mississippi National River and the Recreation Area;
• community engaged research and art-science collaborations, including MSP LTER and Backyard Phenology); and
• all things phenological. (What is phenology, you might ask? It is the study of seasonal change in life cycles of plants and animals.)