Leander Anderegg

Biography

I grew up in rural Colorado, and have spent much of my life trying to justify spending time in the woods. I received a BA in Human Biology from Stanford University in 2011, and got hooked on research while performing honors research on the water use of trembling aspen trees. I went on to study plant ecology with Janneke Hille Ris Lambers at the University of Washington. I received a PhD in Biology from the UW in 2017, with my dissertation focusing on within-species physiological variation and species geographic range constraints. Before joinging EEMB at UCSB, I spent two years as an NSF Biological Collections postdoctoral fellow and two years as a NOAA Climate and Global Change fellow working jointly with Todd Dawson (UC Berkeley) and Joe Berry (Carnegie Institution for Science) studying plant responses to global change through a lens of drought physiology and remote sensing.

Research

Research Description: My research seeks to scale up the physiological responses of plants to biotic and abiotic stress to explain population level, community level and biogeographic processes. I seek to understand how plants respond physiologically to climatic, biotic, and anthropogenic stresses in order to forecast future ecosystem structure and function. My work asks: How do plants cope with stress? What biophysical and evolutionary constraints define plant stress response strategies? How will multiple stresses affect species geographic ranges, community structure, and ecosystem function? I blend plant physiology and ecology to explain community and ecosystem processes ranging from forest mortality to tree biogeography to global photosynthesis.