I am broadly interested in how global change drivers such as warming temperatures, increasing nitrogen deposition, and changing precipitation regimes affect plant communities' ability to take up and store carbon. To date, my PhD research has focused on how small rates of nitrogen addition affect plant community composition and rates of ecosystem carbon fluxes like net ecosystem exchange, gross primary productivity, and ecosystem respiration. Much of what we know about how nitrogen affects ecosystems comes from studies that manipulate the input rates of nitrogen at much higher levels than ecosystems currently experience. I work in an experimental nitrogen addition gradient that spans the current global range of nitrogen deposition rates (0-5g N per meter squared per year) that also includes a high nitrogen addition level (10g N) to compare to other experiments. So far, I have found that, contrary to past studies, a decade of low nitrogen addition did not significantly shift plant functional group composition, although the addition of phosphorus, potassium, and other micronutrients at high rates of nitrogen addition did significantly alter the plant community (Wilcots et al. 2021 Ecology).