My scientific research focuses on integrated pest management. Integrated pest management is a framework that helps farmers grow their crops with fewer pesticides, including herbicides, insecticides, and other chemicals. Pesticides are powerful tools that can be useful, but they also carry important risks that can echo across food systems.
To reduce pesticide dependence, we need to understand more about the ecology of the pests that affect agriculture and come up with more management solutions to deal with pest problems. Typically, I address issues in weed ecology and management with field- or greenhouse-based approaches to study plant populations or plant communities.
Weed ecology. Lately I have been studying field bindweed, a perennial vine with white (or pink) flowers that’s pictured at the top of this page. Bindweed is interesting because it reproduces clonally through underground rhizomes, but it also allocates many resources towards producing large flowers and seeds for sexual reproduction. How does it use both of these reproduction strategies to spread across a variety of agricultural and non-agricultural environments? How does its reproduction change in response to management practices or when it spreads to a new environment? I have been looking at field bindweed flowers, rhizomes, and roots, both in the greenhouse and in the field, to answer these questions.
As a master’s student, I also studied plant reproduction and dispersal, with an emphasis on seed shattering phenology in annual weeds like pigweeds.
Weed management. Most agricultural systems are designed with the specific goal of encouraging plant life. It’s only natural that some non-crop plants might flourish within agricultural systems. Cover crops are plants that can fill up space and use up resources in ways that prevent weeds from growing but still allow the main crop to flourish. In California orchards, cover crops are usually grown in the winter, in order to take advantage of winter rains, underneath dormant nut trees. How do cover crops interact with the weedy plants that usually grow in orchards during the winter? I have been using plant surveys and biomass samples to test cover crops under a variety of different management programs in order to answer this question. I’m continuing to work on these questions as a postdoc, using native plant species as cover crops in Oregon hazelnuts.
As a master’s student, I also studied harvest weed seed control, which is a method for disrupting weed seed dispersal that can take place during the harvest of annual crops.