Our mission is to find ways to enhance the resiliency of ecosystems – and the services they provide – to drivers of global change.  

Our research is highly interdisciplinary, incorporating field work and ecosystem modeling across a continuum of spatial scales.  We have been developing new ecosystem modeling approaches for the past 15 years that combine the best of traditional crop modeling tools with state-of-the-art dynamic, process-based soil-plant-atmosphere models, and most recently 3-D groundwater modeling tools.  This approach is designed to answer questions from the farm scale to regional scale pertaining to the impacts of climate change and land management on crop and biofuel production, greenhouse gas emissions, water quantity and quality, carbon and nutrient (N, P) cycling, and biogeophysical feedbacks to the climate system.  Most recently, we have initiated studies of the Madison urban heat island to better understand its impact on urban ecology and society.