Species Distributions: Now and in the Future
Changes in the global environment will alter where species occur as they shift their distributions to track their preferred conditions.  These changes in species distributions will in turn cause changes in the amount of suitable habitat available to species and hence their population sizes and extinction vulnerabilities.  In addition, as the site level, we expect changes in local diversity due to unequal immigration vs. emigration and/or extinction.  Projects are being conducted in the Feeley lab to predict how individual specie ranges and patterns of biodiversity will be affected by global climate change.  This research is conducted primarily at a regional or continental scale utilizing herbarium records to map species current distributions in relation to known environmental factors and projecting distributions into the future on the basis of GCMs and predicted changes.   In addition to looking at the effects of climate change, we also incorporate possible effects of land use change which will impact the amount of habitat area available to species in the future.  Research is also being conducted at a more local scale using data form repeat censuses of forest plots distributed across a 2.5 km elevational gradient in the Andes of southeastern Peru.  These local studies are critical in that they allow us to estimate the potential migration rates of species which can then feed into the larger scale studies.

Forest Dynamics in a Changing World
An area of active research in the Feeley lab is to understand how global change impacts the dynamics, structure and composition of forests worldwide and the subsequent effects on ecosystem services and species persistence.  Past research has utilized large datasets from the 50-ha forest dynamics plots maintained by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the Center for Tropical Forest Science to analyze changes in forest biomass, tree growth rates and species composition.  A particular emphasis of these studies was to determine the relative contribution of global climate change vs. successional dynamics in driving the observed changes.  For example, using data from forest plots in Malaysia, Thailand and Panama, Feeley et al. showed that the observed changes in forest biomass (i.e, sequestered carbon) cannot be distributed from the null expectation of changes due to natural gap phase dynamics.  Current research is focused on changes in species composition due to large scale shifts in species distributions but also due to changes in the relative performance and competitive abilities of species under altered environmental conditions. This research continues to utilize the large plot database but also incorporates data from a series of 1-ha plots distributed across a 2.5 km elevational gradient in the Andes of southeastern Peru.