Drew MP Peltier

(JAN 2024) Assistant Professor – University of Nevada-Las Vegas

I study tree growth and physiological responses to drought and climate change.

The driving focus of our lab group is understanding how trees respond to their environment across temporal scales, towards improving our capacity to predict forest responses to future global change. Trees respond to climate conditions over long time scales, where precipitation many years in the past may be driving tree growth happening today — we call this “memory.” The lab is focused on improving the quantification of memory in tree growth using new collections of tree rings to parameterize Bayesian hierarchical models  and improve the representation of memory effects in dynamic global vegetation models.

We also explore the mechanisms of memory, such as very long storage of nonstructural carbon reserves. Carbon reserves are the products of past photosynthesis, sugars, starch, and lipids, stored for future metabolic needs. Radiocarbon dating of carbon reserves has shown trees rely on decades-old reserves to survive long-term drought, or 50-100 year old reserves to recover from extreme fire. We work in forests across the western US, from the diminutive piñon (Pinus edulis), to very tall coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) and giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum).

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Graduate Student – School of Life Sciences

Interested in pursuing a phd at UNLV? Please send me an email describing (1) how your potential research interests overlap with work in the lab and (2) a CV/resume. I would be happy to chat.

Coral Bean

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Energetic but largely unhelpful.