Bryan Shuman

My research focuses on how climate patterns have changed in the past, and the effects that these changes have had on ecosystem pattern and process. In particular, I am examining the patterns and drivers of century-to-millennial moisture variation, and how vegetation has responded to these variations. Ongoing work is focused on building a continental-scale dataset of lake-level changes in North America over the past 15,000 years for use in reconstructing past moisture gradients and their changes, and for comparison with climate model simulations. To do so, I have field work based in the Rockies, the Upper Midwest, and the Northeast U.S. aimed at obtaining improved paleohydrologic records, and am making use of these study sites to also examine regional ecological responses. The paleohydrologic work is complemented by compound-specific isotope analyses, and examinations of ecological change have included looking at disturbance-vegetation-climate interactions because both climate change and human land-use will shape future ecological patterns.