College of Biological Sciences
Twin Cities
These researchers use spectral biology and predictive models to understand how variation at one biological scale interacts with environmental change to give rise to emergent properties at the next biological scale, ultimately influencing biodiversity from organisms to the tree of life in ecological communities and across the biosphere. Their goal is to train the next generation of integrative biologists who apply spectral biology to understanding how life’s variation at the smallest scales influences biodiversity at all other scales, and how global change, in turn, impacts the processes that drive diversity at all scales. Using a common currency - the reflectance of photons from the sun - they seek to integrate biology across scales from molecules to biomes.