Todd Dawson

About

Todd Dawson is a Distinguished Professor whose research focuses on the interface between plants and their natural and human-impacted environments. His work employs tools such as physiological plant ecology, stable isotope biogeochemistry, ecohydrology, and remote sensing to study and interpret these interfaces. His investigations draw upon a wide range of physiological methods, observations, experiments, modeling, and the use of stable isotopes to enhance understanding of how the ecophysiological characteristics of plants are shaped by and respond to their environments. Dawson's projects pay special attention to how plant form and function enable adaptation to environmental variation, whether natural or anthropogenic, and how these traits influence community and ecosystem structure and function, with a particular emphasis on woody plants and forest systems.

Research topics

• Environmental science
• Biology
• Ecology
• Botany
• Agronomy

Selected publications

• Plant and root‐zone water isotopes are difficult to measure, explain, and predict: Some practical recommendations for determining plant water sources

  Methods in Ecology and Evolution · 2020-08-02 · 134 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Stable isotope ratios of water (δ 18 O, δ 2 H) have long been used to study a core question in plant ecology and ecohydrology: ‘From where do plants take up water?’ Indeed, decades of research has involved sampling potential plant water sources in the subsurface, classifying those sources as distinct endmembers (e.g. deep vs. shallow soil waters) and then evaluating their contributions to a xylem water sample through mixing‐model analysis to identify the depths of root water uptake. How…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Digging deeper: what the critical zone perspective adds to the study of plant ecophysiology

  New Phytologist · 2020-01-08 · 115 citations

  reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The emergence of critical zone (CZ) science has provided an integrative platform for investigating plant ecophysiology in the context of landscape evolution, weathering and hydrology. The CZ lies between the top of the vegetation canopy and fresh, chemically unaltered bedrock and plays a pivotal role in sustaining life. We consider what the CZ perspective has recently brought to the study of plant ecophysiology. We specifically highlight novel research demonstrating the importance of the deeper…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Representing plant diversity in land models: An evolutionary approach to make “Functional Types” more functional

  Global Change Biology · 2021-12-29 · 89 citations

  reviewOpen access

  Plants are critical mediators of terrestrial mass and energy fluxes, and their structural and functional traits have profound impacts on local and global climate, biogeochemistry, biodiversity, and hydrology. Yet, Earth System Models (ESMs), our most powerful tools for predicting the effects of humans on the coupled biosphere-atmosphere system, simplify the incredible diversity of land plants into a handful of coarse categories of "Plant Functional Types" (PFTs) that often fail to capture ecolog…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A framework to study and predict functional trait syndromes using phylogenetic and environmental data

  Methods in Ecology and Evolution · 2024-02-23 · 21 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Traits do not evolve in isolation but often as part of integrated trait syndromes, yet the relative contributions of environmental effects and evolutionary history on traits and their correlations are not easily resolved. In the present study, we develop a methodological framework to elucidate eco‐evolutionary patterns in functional trait syndromes. We do so by separating the amount of variance and covariance related to phylogenetic heritage and environmental variables ( environmental p…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Different roads, same destination: The shared future of plant ecophysiology and ecohydrology

  Plant Cell & Environment · 2024-05-10 · 11 citations

  reviewOpen access

  Terrestrial water fluxes are substantially mediated by vegetation, while the distribution, growth, health, and mortality of plants are strongly influenced by the availability of water. These interactions, playing out across multiple spatial and temporal scales, link the disciplines of plant ecophysiology and ecohydrology. Despite this connection, the disciplines have provided complementary, but largely independent, perspectives on the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum since their crystallization a…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• RAPID: The Endless Summer: Implications of a 100-year drought for the functional biology of native Californian plants and ecosystems

  NSF · $180k · 2014–2016

• RCN: Biogeosphere-Atmosphere Stable Isotopes Network (BASIN)

  NSF · $682k · 2006–2012

• A Synergistic Approach of Using Fluxes, Isotopes and Models to Partition Plant and Soil Contributions to Ecosystem Exchange of CO2 and H2O

  NSF · $550k · 2003–2008

Frequent coauthors

• John S. Roden

  Ashland (United States)

  43 shared

• J. B. Gaudinski

  University of California, Berkeley

  34 shared

• W. E. Dietrich

  Planetary Science Institute

  30 shared

• Darren R. Sandquist

  California State University, Fullerton

  27 shared

• Susan Trumbore

  27 shared

• Inez Fung

  26 shared

• David D. Ackerly

  University of California, Berkeley

  26 shared

• Edward A. G. Schuur

  Northern Arizona University

  26 shared

Education

• PhD, Botany

  University of Washington

• BA Biology

  University of California Santa Cruz

  1980

Similar researchers at University of California, Berkeley

• Allen Goldsteinh-129
• Trevor Keenanh-85
• Whendee Silverh-80