I have two main areas of research. One involves the analyses of the impact of herbivores on plants, particularly as mediated through the spatial pattern of animal disturbances. Herbivores have direct effects on plants by consuming them, and I and my colleagues and students have investigated the relative impacts of consuming leaves and roots, especially by subterranean pocket gophers. The destruction of relatively small amounts of root material has an impact equal to the consumption of much larger portions of the above ground plant material.
Burrows tend to be highly uniform in their distribution, while mounds tend to be highly patchy.
Both of these types of disturbances generate spatially explicit patterns of influence on the surrounding plant community. Specifically, they initiate a competition-induced wave effect seen in other communities such as spruce forests. Vegetation directly over a burrow and under a mound is consumed or dies and this releases nearby plants from competition for resources such as light, nutrients, and water. These adjacent plants grow larger and capture resources from their neighbors, which, in turn, grow more slowly. This alternating pulse of resource availability generates a wave-like response in plant biomass.