MSI PI Peter Reich (Regents Professor, Forest Resources) and graduate student Rachel C. Putnam have been awarded the 2021 W.S. Cooper Award from the Ecological Society of America (ESA). This award recognizes the authors of an outstanding publication in the field of geobotany, physiographic ecology, plant succession, or the distribution of plants along environmental gradients. The award honors a 2017 publication in the journal Ecological Monographs that presented the findings of a large-scale study of sugar maple trees, an ecologically important species, across a large climatic gradient. A description of the research can be found on the ESA website: Ecological Society of America Announces 2021 Award Recipients.
Regents Professor Reich uses MSI resources for a project that is developing new global land models, shifting from current models that use a plant functional type approach to one that uses plant traits, within a framework of simultaneously improving fundamental physiological relations that are at the core of model carbon cycling algorithms.