Jeremy W. Lichstein

Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
Phone: (609) 258-2594
Fax: (609) 258-7715
E-mail: JWL@princeton.edu

I am a postdoctoral researcher with Steve Pacala at Princeton University. My main research interests are:

The future state of global ecosystems depends critically on how vegetation responds to climate, and how associated changes in carbon sequestration, evapotranspiration, and earth's surface albedo affect the atmosphere. Dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) are key components of coupled climate-carbon cycle models used to study these complex interactions. I, along with others in the Pacala lab, am working on a new DGVM that realistically represents biodiversity and competition among individual trees. This work builds on a forest dynamics model that we have recently developed. The model is based on an assumption of optimal space-filling by canopy trees, which we call the perfect plasticity approximation (PPA). The model is mathematically tractable, so that many aspects of its behavior can be solved for analytically. For example, I have derived expressions that predict the degree of local mixing among species adapted to different soil types. This type of analysis is not possible with other quasi-realistic forest models. Furthermore, the PPA is computationally efficient, so that global applications are practical. A prototype version of a PPA-based DGVM is still a few years off. In the meantime, I am collaborating with NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory to improve their current DGVM by assimilating forest inventory and eddy covariance data.

Selected publications

Lichstein, J.W., J. Dushoff, K. Ogle, A. Chen, D.W. Purves, J.P. Caspersen, and S.W. Pacala. 2009. Unlocking the forest inventory data: relating individual-tree performance to unmeasured environmental factors. Ecological Applications in press

Chisholm, R.A, and J.W. Lichstein. 2009. Linking dispersal, immigration and scale in the neutral theory of biodiversity. Ecology Letters in press

Lichstein, J.W., C. Wirth, H.S. Horn, and S.W. Pacala. 2009. Biomass chronosequences of United States forests: implications for carbon storage and forest management. Pages 301-341 in C. Wirth, G. Gleixner, and M. Heimann, eds. Old-growth forests: function, fate and value. Ecological Studies vol. 207, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg. pdf

Purves, D.W., J.W. Lichstein, N. Strigul, and S.W. Pacala. 2008. Predicting and understanding forest dynamics using a simple, tractable model. PNAS 105(44):17018-17022. pdf

Wirth C., J.W. Lichstein, J. Dushoff, A. Chen, and F.S. Chapin III. 2008. White spruce meets black spruce: dispersal, postfire establishment, and growth in a warming climate. Ecological Monographs 78(4):489-505. pdf

Lichstein, J.W., J. Dushoff, S.A. Levin, and S.W. Pacala. 2007. Intraspecific variation and species coexistence. American Naturalist 170(6):807-818. pdf

Purves, D.W., J.W. Lichstein, and S.W. Pacala. 2007. Crown plasticity and competition for canopy space: a new spatially implicit model parameterized for 250 North American tree species. PLoS ONE 2(9):e870. pdf

Lichstein, J.W. 2007. Multiple regression on distance matrices: a multivariate spatial analysis tool. Plant Ecology 188(2):117-131. pdf

Lichstein, J.W., T.R. Simons, S.A. Shriner, and K.E. Franzreb. 2002. Spatial autocorrelation and autoregressive models in ecology. Ecological Monographs 72(3):445-463. pdf

my CV

FIA data sample

FIA data entire