COLIN AVERILL

Ecologists have access to larger data sets than ever before. We use big data approaches to understand the biogeography of forests, fungi and bacteria, and link this biogeography to forest carbon sequestration. We make heavy use of large-scale microbial sequence data, forest inventory data sets, and soil carbon data sets. We embrace frequentist, Bayesian, and machine learning frameworks to achieve this, depending on which approach best fits the question at hand... Mathematical models underpin ecological theory, as well as how theory is applied to represent ecology within ecosystem and Earth-system models. We build first-principles mathematical models to demonstrate how explicit representation of microbial ecology can change both ecological theory and carbon cycle predictions under global change... Soils are alive. Incredibly diverse forest microbial communities have profound impacts on our world that we are just beginning to grasp. My team studies the forest microbiome. How does..