Current research interests reflect my initial training as a Plant Physiological Ecologist and a two-decade association with large-scale ecosystem research through the NSF Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program. Thus, traditional leaf-level gas exchange, plant water relations and energy balance studies have been a staple of our research for many years, with a focus on the elucidation of ecophysiological mechanisms that drive ecological processes and reflect evolutionary change. This approach has been broadened by involvement with the Konza Prairie (http://www.konza.ksu.edu/) LTER program. These interactions have provided our lab with a strong appreciation for collaborative, interdisciplinary research across broad spatial and temporal scales. Indeed, we now prefer to label ourselves as Plant Ecologists that are comfortable working at scales varying from the leaf to the landscape. Collaborative, interdisciplinary research is appealing and important because it provides scientists the opportunity to make key contributions within the specific framework of a single discipline (a traditional approach), as well as the tools to synthesize across disciplines and tackle issues that the single lab approach cannot. This synthetic approach to Ecology will become more important in the future, and it best describes our group's current and future research interests

Hoover, D.L., A.K. Knapp and M.D. Smith. 2014. Resistance and resilience of a grassland ecosystem to climate extremes, Ecology 95: 2646–2656. Wilcox, K.R., J.C. von Fischer, J.M. Muscha, M.K. Petersen and A.K. Knapp. 2015. Contrasting above- and belowground sensitivity of three Great Plains grasslands to altered rainfall regimes. Global Change Biology 21: 335-344. Knapp, A.K., C.J.W. Carroll, E.M. Denton, K.J. La Pierre, S.L. Collins and M.D. Smith. 2015. Differential sensitivity to regional-scale drought in six central U.S. grasslands. Oecologia 177: 949-957. Knapp A.K., D.L. Hoover, K.R. Wilcox, M.L. Avolio, S.E. Koerner, K.J. La Pierre, M.E. Loik, Y. Luo, O.E. Sala, and M.D. Smith. 2015. Characterizing differences in precipitation regimes of extreme wet and dry years: Implications for climate change experiments. Global Change Biology 21: 2624–2633.