Plants are the Earth’s living reservoir of energy, as the energy captured and stored in plants regulates environmental cycles, including carbon, water, nutrients, and sequestration of pollutants. Understanding how plants respond to changes in their environment, therefore, will greatly improve the way we manage ecosystems and the services they provide to society. Dr. Jason Fridley, Associate Professor of Biology at Syracuse University, hopes to gain a deeper understanding of the ecology of plant communities, including their organization, distribution, and control over ecosystem processes, to design and protect a habitable biosphere for both humans and the natural diversity of living organisms. Collaborative and dynamic, much of Dr. Fridley’s work is performed in the context of species invasions and environmental change. By studying how the changing climate, land use practices, and species introductions affect plant evolution and behavior, Dr. Fridley hopes to improve predictions of what our ecosystems will look like in the future.

Currently focused on woody plants, Dr. Fridley, his research staff, and students partner with national and international collaborators at several US universities, a research hub in the United Kingdom, in France, and in New Zealand to develop and test theory about how plants allocate and utilize energy and materials depending on their environment and interactions with other organisms. Basic research at his large, on-campus experimental garden combines fine-scale details of how plants function, from roots to shoots, with global-scale patterns of how these functions were influenced by a species’ evolutionary history. Ultimately, Dr. Fridley’s long-term goal is to establish common gardens and experiments with collaborators in Europe and East Asia, to investigate plant behaviors in their native and invasive ranges to refine appropriate solutions for management.

Current research includes:

• Why are some ecosystems resistant to climate change? In most ecosystems, if you artificially warm the plants or the soil, the vegetation shifts to more representation by shrubs and grasses in just a few years. But some ecosystems don't respond, or take much longer to respond and the changes are less pronounced. Why? To understand what determines whether forests or fields are sensitive to a changing climate, Dr. Fridley examines the role of various environmental and biological factors, including the capacity of plants to locally adapt through genetic change, the significance of local environmental heterogeneity, and whether species interactions amplify climate responses.
• How are plant introductions altering the vegetation of the Northern Hemisphere? Ecosystems across the Northern Hemisphere are being rapidly transformed by foreign species--in some cases changing from a native to non-native dominant species within a few decades. For example, Eastern North American forests are being invaded by East Asian woody species like honeysuckle; many European forests are being invaded by North American trees like black cherry; meadows across Europe and East Asia are being invaded by North American meadow plants like goldenrod. Conversely, East Asian forests seem resistant to invasions, as do North American meadows, and all human-associated habitats like lawns and roadsides are dominated by European weeds. Dr. Fridley, along with colleagues abroad, investigates why, particularly in the context of the evolutionary history of those regions.
• How do fields transition to forests? If you abandon a cornfield in the southeastern US, it becomes a pine forest in less than a decade. If you do the same in the Northeast, the field can resist invasion by trees for up to a century. Why? Dr. Fridley is gaining insight into how field plants and trees interact, and in doing so, is helping to predict how changing land management practices across the US impacts how ecosystems store carbon and regulate nutrient and water fluxes.