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Ecology - Physiological

Peter S. Curtis

Professor, Chairperson

300 Aronoff Laboratory

318 W. 12th Avenue Columbus, OH 43210

Phone: 614-292-8280

Fax: 614-292-2030

E-mail: curtis.7@osu.edu

Lab Web Page: http://www.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~pcurtis/index.htm

Education: Ph.D., University of California, Davis, Botany M.S., Stony Brook University, Biology A.B., University of California, Berkeley, Zoology

Brief Description of Research Interests

Plant and Ecosystem Ecology

Detailed Research Interests

My research centers on ecological responses to global change. I am also involved with efforts to apply ecological principals to the restoration of human altered landscapes. Global change phenomena of interest include rising atmospheric carbon dioxide, altered climatic drivers such as temperature and precipitation, and changes in land use. In a major research activity currently under way, we are measuring forest-wide carbon, water and energy exchanges over a northern hardwood ecosystem using both micro-meteorological and ecological techniques. This work will allow us to quantify the carbon sink strength of these forests and to relate changes in this sink to patterns of climate variability and to ecological processes operating at the plant and soil level. This research is central to understanding the ecological consequences of climate change. Undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate research opportunities within this research program can be found at: http://www.biosci.ohio-state.edu/~pcurtis/UMBS~Flux/ . Other recent work in my lab has been aimed at linking above-and-below-ground responses to increased atmospheric CO2 as a means of understanding the long-term ecological and evolutionary consequences of this perturbation. My students and I also engage in prairie restoration ecology.

Key Citations

Gough, C.M., C.S. Vogel, H.P. Schmid, H-B. Su, and P.S. Curtis. 2006. Multi-year convergence of biometric and meteorological estimates of forest carbon storage. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology (in press).

Curtis, P.S., C.S. Vogel, C.M. Gough, H.P. Schmid, H.-B. Su, and B.D. Bovard. 2005. Respiratory carbon losses and the carbon-use efficiency of a northern hardwood forest, 1999 – 2003. New Phytologist 167: 437-456.

Averett, J.M., R.A. Klips, L. Nave, S.D. Frey, and P.S. Curtis. 2004. The effects of soil carbon amendment on nitrogen availability and plant growth in an experimental tallgrass prairie restoration. Restoration Ecology 12: 567-573.

Jablonski, L.M., X. Wang, and P.S. Curtis. 2002. Plant reproduction under elevated CO2 conditions: A meta-analysis of reports on 79 crop and wild species. New Phytologist 156: 9-26

Curtis, P.S. , P.J. Hanson, P. Bolstad, C. Barford, J.C. Randolph, H.P. Schmid, K.B. Wilson. 2002. Biometric and eddy-covariance based estimates of ecosystem carbon storage in five eastern North American deciduous forests. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 113: 3–19.

Courses

EEOB H557, Tropical Field Ecology EEOB 674, Physiological Ecology of Plants EEOB 720, Community and Ecosystem Ecology

Lab Group

Post-docs: Christopher Gough (Ph.D., Virginia Tech.) Vikas Malik (Ph.D., Kurukshetra University)

Graduate Students: Lucas Nave, Ph.D. (B.A., Wittenberg University). Charlie Flower, M.S. (B.S., Lake Forest College). Sara Parks, M.S. (B.S., Ball State University). Brady Hardiman, Ph.D. (B.S., Ashland College).

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