Lawren Sack

About

Lawren Sack is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA. His research broadly focuses on the mechanisms underlying the function and co-existence of plant species, including responses to resources, tolerance of environmental challenges, and competition. His work explores the evolution and functional consequences of diversity in plant traits, examining processes across scales from molecules to ecosystems. Current research areas include the hydraulics of leaves and whole plants, the evolution and diversity of leaf designs, plant responses to resource supply combinations, scaling laws of plant design during evolution and ontogeny, and ecohydrology of native versus invasive forests.

Research topics

• Biology
• Computer Science
• Ecology
• Geography
• Environmental science
• Botany
• Artificial Intelligence
• Neuroscience
• Geology
• Atmospheric sciences

Selected publications

• Plant Trait Networks: Improved Resolution of the Dimensionality of Adaptation

  Trends in Ecology & Evolution · 2020 · 280 citations

  Functional traits are frequently used to evaluate plant adaptation across environments. Yet, traits tend to have multiple functions and interactions, which cannot be accounted for in traditional correlation analyses. Plant trait networks (PTNs) clarify complex relationships among traits, enable the calculation of metrics for the topology of trait coordination and the importance of given traits in PTNs, and how they shift across communities. Recent studies of PTNs provide new insights into some i…

  DOI

• ForestGEO: Understanding forest diversity and dynamics through a global observatory network

  Biological Conservation · 2020 · 250 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Global root traits (GRooT) database

  Global Ecology and Biogeography · 2020 · 215 citations

  Abstract Motivation Trait data are fundamental to the quantitative description of plant form and function. Although root traits capture key dimensions related to plant responses to changing environmental conditions and effects on ecosystem processes, they have rarely been included in large‐scale comparative studies and global models. For instance, root traits remain absent from nearly all studies that define the global spectrum of plant form and function. Thus, to overcome conceptual and methodo…

  DOI

• Detecting forest response to droughts with global observations of vegetation water content

  Global Change Biology · 2021 · 206 citations

  Droughts in a warming climate have become more common and more extreme, making understanding forest responses to water stress increasingly pressing. Analysis of water stress in trees has long focused on water potential in xylem and leaves, which influences stomatal closure and water flow through the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. At the same time, changes of vegetation water content (VWC) are linked to a range of tree responses, including fluxes of water and carbon, mortality, flammability, an…

  DOI

• Burning questions for a warming and changing world: 15 unknowns in plant abiotic stress

  The Plant Cell · 2022 · 155 citations

  We present unresolved questions in plant abiotic stress biology as posed by 15 research groups with expertise spanning eco-physiology to cell and molecular biology. Common themes of these questions include the need to better understand how plants detect water availability, temperature, salinity, and rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels; how environmental signals interface with endogenous signaling and development (e.g. circadian clock and flowering time); and how this integrated signaling controls…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: The Evolution of Leaf Form in Viburnum (Adoxaceae)

  NSF · $120k · 2009–2013

• CAREER: The coordination of leaf hydraulics, structure and gas exchange

  NSF · $888k · 2006–2007

• Collaborative Research: MRA: Scaling from Traits to Forest Ecosystem Fluxes and Responses to Climate Change, from Stand to Continent

  NSF · $874k · 2020–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Christine Scoffoni

  California State University Los Angeles

  72 shared

• Jérôme Chave

  Institut de Recherche pour le Développement

  43 shared

• Thomas N. Buckley

  Plant (United States)

  37 shared

• Megan K. Bartlett

  University of California, Davis

  37 shared

• Isabelle Maréchaux

  Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement

  31 shared

• Kristina J. Anderson‐Teixeira

  ForestGEO

  31 shared

• Nianpeng He

  Northeast Forestry University

  31 shared

• Peter B. Reich

  University of Minnesota

  30 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2000

• M.S., Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1996

• B.A., Biology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1994

Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles

• H. Bradley Shafferh-80
• Glen MacDonaldh-79
• Michael Alfaroh-66