Melissa Pastore

Background & Expertise

Broadly, Melissa Pastore's research investigates how ecological pressures and the interactions among them influence plant dynamics, biogeochemical cycles and ecosystem function. She takes an integrative, cross-scale research approach that combines large-scale observational networks, long-term datasets, field experiments and mechanistic greenhouse and laboratory studies. By exploring processes that occur over time frames of minutes to decades and scales ranging from single leaves to broad landscapes, Pastore’s work contributes novel insight into how global changes and other pressures impact ecosystems and the communities that rely on them. Her recent work focuses on forest microclimates and the factors that shape them to increase understanding of how forests can be managed to sustain cold-dependent species and functions in a changing world. As a national lead for the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) soil monitoring program, she investigates long-term changes in soil carbon and other soil properties across U.S. forests and links belowground dynamics to forest productivity, regeneration and health. She holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota.