Research Expertise and Interest

global change ecology, biogeography, spectral ecology, remote sensing, climate change impacts on biodiversity and ecological functioning

Research Description

Stephanie Pau's research addresses how terrestrial ecosystems are impacted by climate change. She focuses on understanding interactions between plants and their environment. More specifically, she is interested in the role of biodiversity and plant traits in ecosystem functions, and how these change along environmental gradients. Much of her work uses satellite, drone, or mounted camera observations (i.e., remote sensing), which provide repeated and spatially-extensive measurements of the Earth’s surface. Remote sensing can help us “see” wavelengths of reflected energy from plants that we cannot see with our own eyes. For example, near-infrared reflectance is a region beyond visible wavelengths, and this region of reflected energy contains valuable information about differences in plant species’ photosynthetic activity. She combines remote sensing observations with intensive boots-on-the-ground field measurements. These can be used to develop relationships between plant reflectance and ecological properties for mapping biodiversity and ecological function across landscapes.