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Research Interests

I am a broadly trained plant physiological ecologist who is interested in the evolution of physiological traits in plants and the impacts of climate variability and change on ecosystems. My research focuses on questions about plant physiological processes in an ecological and evolutionary context, with implications for how organisms work and how ecosystems function. Much of my early work was focused on the physiological ecology of desert plants. I studied how desert species allocate resources to flowering and seed production (Huxman and Loik 1997). Early on I showed that increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases influence growth and reproduction in a suite of desert plant species such that an invasive grass species becomes a dominant feature of the Mojave Desert plant community (Huxman and Smith 2001), increasing the probability of fire in these arid lands (Smith et al., 2000). I continued working on the physiological ecology of desert species with graduate students in EEB and in collaboration with a number of labs at the University of Arizona and in other settings.

I have focused my recent research on the question of how ecosystem carbon balance is influenced by climate (with the help of many graduate students and collaborators!). We have shown that diverse biomes, such as forests, shrublands, grasslands, and deserts, all converge to a common rain-use efficiency (plant production per unit rainfall input) during historically low precipitation years (Huxman et al., 2004). This observation provides an anchorfor the development of ecosystem models, insight into how climate variability translates to variation in biological activity, and a hierarchical description of how species, biogeochemistry, and climate interact to control ecosystem processes. Further, we have illustrated how differential responses of ecosystem photosynthetic and respiratory activity through time to temperature variation and precipitation events influences short- and long-term patterns of biosphere / atmosphere exchange of CO2 (Huxman et al., 2003; Huxman et al., 2004). In collaboration with Brian Enquist, we have worked to develop a mechanistic understanding of how respiratory processes are expressed across gradients of latitude and temperature (Enquist et al., 2003)