Associate Professor Jennifer Powers, an MSI Principal Investigator from the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, is a co-author on a recent study that investigated how lianas – the vines that grow on trees in tropical forests – affect the ability of those forests to store carbon. The study was recently published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. (Geertje M.F. van der Heijden, Jennifer S. Powers, and Stegan A. Schnitzer. 2015 Lianas reduce carbon accumulation and storage in tropical forests. 112(43):13267. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1504869112.
An article about this research can be found on the Office of the Vice President for Research's Inquiry blog. Professor Powers uses MSI for computationally intensive modeling of tropical forests to study factors contributing to their biologic diversity.