Dryland Ecosystems Research Team (DERT)
Arizona State University
Welcome to the DERT!
We are broadly interested in understanding links between organisms and ecosystem processes in dryland environments. We are especially interested in exploring how these organism-ecosystem links are affected by human activities (e.g., atmospheric nitrogen deposition, climate change, and land management). Most of our work explores the impacts of human activities on organism-ecosystem links within two general themes: (1) the patterns and mechanisms by which organisms affect carbon nutrient cycles and (2) the patterns and mechanisms by which ecosystem processes respond to human perturbations to the environment (e.g. climate change and changing human land use). We address these questions through research that integrates manipulative field experiments with modeling. Our experimental approach spans a broad range of techniques, from the physiological level to the ecosystem level, allowing us to explore links among different levels of ecological organization. Our work is primarily in arid and semi-arid environments. These ‘drylands’ contain a large and rapidly increasing portion of the world’s human population, particularly in developing nations where human livelihoods are often tightly linked to sustainable use of drylands.
Visit the website for the NSF Decomposition Across Drylands (DeAD) project
Principal Investigator
Dr. Heather Throop
Professor
School of Earth and Space Exploration
- and -
School of Life Sciences
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona, USA
heather.throop <at> asu.edu
External Affiliations
Associate Scientist
Ongava Research Centre, Namibia
Research Associate
Gobabeb Namib Research Institute, Namibia
ASU Affiliations
Center for Biodiversity Outcomes
Central Arizona-Phoenix Long Term Ecological Research
Global Drylands Center
Global Futures Lab
Water Institute
DERT News
Prospective Students
Find more information about joining our team here.
