Dr Andrew Nottingham

Profile

My research aims to improve our understanding of how soils interact with vegetation and the climate and how those interactions are affected by global environmental change.

The focus of my research is on tropical lowland forests and tropical montane ecosystems, where I study soil biogeochemical cycling under global change and microbial ecology - the minute interactions between plants and microbes that influence entire ecosystem functioning. My wider research interests span biogeochemical cycles, forest ecology, soil ecology and global change.

I use a combination of long-term manipulation experiments, observations along natural environmental gradients and small-scale experimental studies. My recent work investigates the impact of climate warming on tropical forest plant and soil ecology and soil biogeochemistry. To understand impacts in lowland forest I have created a long-term soil warming experiment in lowland tropical forest (SWELTR; Soil Warming Experiment in Lowland TRopical forest) at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. To investigate impacts across larger scales and longer time-frames I study natural temperature gradients across tropical mountains (with The Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group; https://www.andesconservation.org).

My current research is funded by the NERC Independent research fellowship (IRF) scheme.

Responsibilities

• NERC Independent research fellow

• Soil carbon and climate warming in tropical forests: using experimentation and elevation to reveal responses across space and time

Qualifications

• PhD Tropical Forest Ecology, Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge.

Research groups and institutes

• Ecology and Global Change