You may deem this as research vetted by the peer-review process, for what value that adds.
My research has had good exposure, being published in 23 different international journals, book chapters, and a monograph, in chemistry, physics, plant physiology, ecology, global change, agronomy, remote sensing, and other fields (evidence of a poor attention span for a given discipline?). Still, there are findings that I wish to have more utility in research and in applications. One example with practical and policy implications is my the formulation that my wife, Dr. Lou Ellen Kay, and I developed of functional balance in plants’ nutrient acquisition and nutrient use (for photosynthesis), particularly as it offers a physiological framework for understanding the drop in tissue N content at elevated CO2. The common explanation for the drop is dilution by high carbohydate accumulation, which is not so useful. I’ve elaborated more on high-CO2 effects, projecting diversity in plant responses in tissue N content, N-use efficiency, water-use efficiency, and growth rate. In climate-change research, many models of diverse (or, alternatively, in-common) responses of plants focus on temperature and precipitation changes, omitting the direct physiological responses to CO2. Another example is my finding, on the modeling side of a modeling-experiment study, that pecan trees apparently lack a water-sparing response to low relative humidity. This has implications for irrigation water use, orchard siting, and other policies.
One piece of research I’ll highlight here is work on as comprehensive a framework as my colleague, Hormoz BassiriRad, and I could put together for the study of biological extreme events. As of early March, 2020, it had been cited 258 times in the peer-reviewed literature.
These under-utilized ideas will be populated on this page. In this effort, especially, I will welcome comments and collaborations. I am still setting up the structure of comment handling at this time.