Native Plant Society of New Mexico Native Plant Society of New Mexico

Join Dr. Scott Ferrenberg as he presents Caught Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sky: plant responses to drought, disturbance, and natural enemies across environmental gradients.

Attend the Zoom meeting by clicking here.

Research in the Ferrenberg lab group, also known as the Global Change Ecology Lab, focuses on understanding how plants and insects will respond to rapid climate change, altered disturbance regimes, and land-use change in dryland ecosystems. The group utilizes a combination of experiments that impose droughts and disturbances, alongside observations across natural climatic/disturbance gradients to quantify species responses to these pressures. Because plants are limited in their capacity to avoid global change pressures, a longstanding focus in the research group is describing phenotypic variation within plant populations that might allow for local adaptation to a changing world. One example of this work is the group’s effort to compare the growth and defense traits of coniferous trees that either survived or died during bark beetle outbreaks and droughts.