Lynn Moore, PhD Student, Department of Botany and Program in Ecology, University of Wyoming

My research is focused upon the interactions between temperature, precipitation, and the seasonal cycle of plants on a semiarid grassland.  The importance of understanding these interactions lies in a plants ability to adjust its lifecycle around suitable and unsuitable periods of growth.  The plants of the shortgrass steppe are an ideal system to elucidate these interactions because it is a temperate system, it is water limited, and as a grass dominated system, the effects of temperature and precipitation will be more pronounced than other effects such as photoperiod or endogenous controls. I propose to investigate how changes in phenology may influence the inter and intra annual growing season patterns of the shortgrass steppe at the individual and ecosystem scale.  This research has the potential to be developed into predictive models, which can be used in ecological forecasting and as an input for improving climate change projections.  Characterizing changes in growing season on vegetation will contribute to the development of theory in climate change research and generate information useful to land owners and land managers throughout the central plains of North America.

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Kelsey Simpson, MS Student, Department of Botany, University of Wyoming

I am interested in examining the interactions between woody plants and grasses across a soil texture gradient. I am specifically interested in how the success of Dalmatian toadflax and Wyoming big sagebrush will change over a fine to coarse soil texture gradient and how will the presence of grasses influence the response of Dalmatian toadflax and Wyoming big sagebrush to a soil texture gradient.