Kueppers Lab Group

Dr. Marshall Worsham filed his dissertation during the Spring semester 2025, and participated in ERG’s fabulous May graduation ceremony. He’s moved on to a new postdoc position at Berkeley Lab. Congratulations Marshall!! Nishita Dashpute and Trisha Venkatesh, who have both been working with the lab and who completed undergraduate research theses, also graduated with their…

Xiulin Gao published an exciting paper in New Phytologist that reported advances in modeling annual grassland dynamics. Using FATES, a vegetation demographic model, she showed that carbon, water and energy fluxes in California’s annual grasslands are sensitive to assumed grass allometry, but were more strongly influenced by leaf traits that influence plant phenology and physiology.…

The first paper from Marshall Worsham’s dissertation is out in Remote Sensing of Environment! It shows that, in the East River watershed, which is in some of the highest headwaters of the Colorado River, forest structure is most strongly associated with snow and elevation. Marshall developed and has made available a work flow for using…

Xiulin Gao’s paper, Allometric relationships and trade‐offs in 11 common Mediterranean‐climate grasses, is now out in Ecological Applications! Her study used a greenhouse experiment to fill gaps in our understanding of plant allocation and architecture via examination of allometric relationships. She examined both C3 and C4 annual and perennial species commonly found in California. She’s…

Congratulations to the 2024 graduates from ERG – especially M.S. graduates Nicole Lau and Sasha Figel. In addition to their interdisciplinary coursework, Nicole completed a masters project on subalpine tree species differences in xylem conductivity and vulnerability to cavitation during drought, while Sasha completed a masters project on the drivers of prescribed fire costs across…