Beech leaf disease (BLD) is an emergent and rapidly spreading disease, spread by an introduced nematode and expected to cause widespread mortality of a foundational forest species. In a collaboration with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, the Brodersen Physiological Plant Ecology Lab, and the Poulos Forests & Global Change Lab at Wesleyan, we are investigating the forest dynamics and ecophysiological impacts of beech leaf disease as it progresses through New England. I am co-leading work to investigate whether carbon starvation through exhaustion of non-structural carbohydrate stores may be responsible for BLD-induced mortality.

The hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA) is another introduced forest pest, which causes decline or death in Eastern hemlocks by feeding on sap from their needles. Decisions on forest management, and consequences for forest composition and carbon storage in forest ecosystems and harvested wood products, depend on knowledge of how HWA affects the structural properties of wood in the trees it infests. In a collaboration with researchers from UMass Amherst Department of Environmental Conservation, I am comparing and employing non-destructive methods to assess wood structural losses and decay status. Specifically, I am using sonic and electrical resistance tomography to image the condition inside living trees.

I am further leveraging this tomography technology to explore whether tree internal decay may be a cryptic driver of carbon losses and greenhouse gas emissions in forests. In our work on tree methane emissions at Harvard Forest, I am investigating whether incipient decay in living trees is responsible for stem methane emissions due to internal moisture accumulation, anoxia, and structural or non-structural carbohydrate consumption.