Helene C. Muller-Landau

Helene Muller-Landau is a Senior Scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute based in Panama and lead scientist of the ForestGEO Global Carbon Program.

Her research concerns the patterns, causes, and consequences of plant diversity. Research in her lab seeks to understand the processes determining tropical forest biomass, dynamics, plant species composition, and diversity, and their variation within and among sites and over time. The research encompasses a wide variety of topics in community and ecosystem ecology, which are studied through a combination of field research, data analysis, and modelling.

In terms of causes, she examines proximate correlates such as climatic factors and functional traits as well as the ultimate causes deriving from selective forces, physiological constraints, and underlying tradeoffs. The consequences that interest her most at this time are those concerning carbon pools and fluxes – specifically, how the plant species composition of a forest affects the quantity of carbon stored in various pools (e.g., living trees, dead and decomposing trees, and the soil), the residence times in these pools, the fluxes in and out of them, and their sensitivity to climate variation. She uses a combination of empirical and theoretical approaches to investigate these questions.

Muller-Landau has a B.A. in mathematics and statistics from Swarthmore College and her Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology is from Princeton University.