Stanley D. Smith

Professor and Associate Vice President for Research

Ph.D. Arizona State University, Tempe

Global Change and its Potential Effects on Dryland Ecosystems

stan.smith@unlv.edu

I am a plant physiological ecologist that has spent the past 25 years studying how desert plants adapt to the stressful environments that they occupy. Over the past 10 years, our lab group has concentrated on how global change factors, particularly elevated atmospheric CO₂, affect the structure and function of desert plants and ecosystems. Most of our global change research program has occurred at the Nevada Desert FACE Facility, a whole-ecosystem CO₂ manipulation experiment, and a second site in which we are experimentally addressing three other important global change factors – land disturbance, nitrogen deposition, and altered precipitation patterns. The FACE site manipulation was concluded in 2007, and we are currently analyzing the 10-year dataset from that Department of Energy sponsored experiment.

Selected Publications

• Knapp AK, Beier C, . . . Smith SD et al. (2008) Consequences of more extreme precipitation regimes for terrestrial ecosystems. BioScience (in press).
• Huxman TE, Smith MD, . . . Smith SD et al. (2004) Convergence across biomes to a common rain-use efficiency. Nature 429:651-654.
• Nowak RS, Ellsworth DS, Smith SD (2004) Tansley Review: Plant functional responses to elevated atmospheric CO₂ – Do data from FACE experiments support early predictions? New Phytologist 162:253-280.
• Nagel JM, Griffin KL, Huxman TE, Smith SD (2004) CO₂ enrichment reduces the energetic cost of biomass construction in an invasive desert grass. Ecology 85:100-106.
• Hamerlynck EP, McAuliffe JR, McDonald EV, Smith SD (2002) Ecological responses of two Mojave Desert shrubs to soil horizon development and soil water dynamics. Ecology 83:768-779.
• Smith SD, Huxman TE et al. (2000) Elevated CO₂ increases productivity and invasive species success in an arid ecosystem. Nature 408:79-82.
• Smith SD, Monson RK, Anderson JE (1997) Physiological Ecology of North American Desert Plants. Springer-Verlag, Berlin.