About

Liza Comita is a Davis-Denkmann Professor of Tropical Forest Ecology at the Yale School of the Environment. She earned her BA in Biology and MA in Conservation Biology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999, and her PhD in Plant Biology from the University of Georgia in 2006. She joined Yale's faculty in July 2014, after serving as an assistant professor at The Ohio State University and holding postdoctoral positions at the University of Minnesota, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. Her research focuses on the ecological mechanisms driving patterns of diversity, dynamics, and species distributions in both pristine and human-altered tropical forests. Her work combines extensive field studies of forest dynamics with advanced statistical techniques to generate insights into tropical forest regeneration and community structuring.

Research topics

• Geography
• Environmental science
• Ecology
• Biology
• Environmental resource management

Selected publications

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

  Biological Conservation · 2020 · 250 citations

  • Ecology
  • Geography
  • Environmental resource management
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• LTREB Renewal: Long-Term Studies of Seedling and Small Sapling Community Dynamics in a Neotropical Forest

  NSF · $457k · 2012–2014

• Collaborative Research: Genetic diversity, resistance genes, and negative density dependence in tropical tree seedling dynamics

  NSF · $159k · 2015–2019

• Collaborative Research: Genetic diversity, resistance genes, and negative density dependence in tropical tree seedling dynamics

  NSF · $58k · 2011–2013

• CAREER: Drivers of tropical tree seedling dynamics and species coexistence along environmental gradients

  NSF · $620k · 2019–2025

• LTREB Renewal: Long-Term Studies of Seedling and Small Sapling Community Dynamics in a Neotropical Forest

  NSF · $317k · 2014–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Stephen P. Hubbell

  University of California, Los Angeles

  123 shared

• Richard Condit

  80 shared

• Jill Thompson

  UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology

  78 shared

• Jess K. Zimmerman

  University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras

  69 shared

• H. S. Dattaraja

  Indian Institute of Science Bangalore

  68 shared

• Helene C. Muller‐Landau

  68 shared

• Akira Itoh

  Waseda University

  53 shared

• I‐Fang Sun

  National Dong Hwa University

  53 shared

Labs

• Liza Comita's LabPI

Similar researchers at Yale University

• Mark Gersteinh-217
• Liangbing Huh-172
• Akiko Iwasakih-145
• Alan Kazdinh-142
• Douglas L. Rothmanh-125