My primary research interests include community ecology of tropical plants and plant–soil interactions, with particular interest in mechanisms that determine species distribution patterns along soil nutrient gradients. However, I have broad interests across both community and ecosystem ecology. My research is very interdisciplinary, combining approaches of plant community ecology, physiology and biogeochemistry to obtain a more complete understanding of how soil properties shape plant communities. I have conducted both field and growing house experiments as well as plant and soil surveys. I use multiple research tools including statistical community analyses, empirical field and experimental stable isotope techniques, as well as herbivore-exclusion, nutrient manipulation, and natural soil gradient field transplant experiments.