Professor Maria Miriti’s research incorporates experimental, statistical, and demographic methods to understand the processes that regulate plant populations and communities. Plants can’t move and resources are not evenly distributed within a habitat, which suggests that the responses of an individual plant better reflect the quality of its local conditions more so than the quality of the overall habitat where the population resides. The spatial pattern of plants can provide useful information about habitat quality for plants of different species or sizes over time.
By integrating information on plant spatial distributions, the distribution of resources, and plant demography, her research focuses on basic research questions including factors that permit species to coexist and applied questions such as anticipating how communities may or may not tolerate radical changes to habitat quality.
Dr. Miriti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Evolution, Ecology and Organimsal Biology at Ohio State University. Dr. Miriti is dedicated to issues of inclusion and equity in ecology and environmental sciences.
Sponsored by the Environmental Change Initiative.