As the biodiversity crisis and climate change both intensify, it is crucial to understand the ecology of both individual rare species and broader natural communities across space and time to allow effective conservation action. Our research contributes to this understanding by focusing on the drivers of plant diversity in coastal and wetland ecosystems. 

​See below for project summaries addressing the overarching themes we're pursuing:
Rare plant distribution and abundance
Drivers and spatial scale of wetland plant assemblage diversity

Drivers and spatial scale of wetland plant assemblage diversity

Spatial Variability along Stress Gradients. This project, funded in part by UNF's Institute of Environmental Research & Education and Webb Summer Fellowship, quantifies wetland plant diversity across flooding and salinity gradients in Northeast FL, USA. We are currently finalizing design and collecting initial data.  

​Land Management and Cross-Scale Diversity. This project, funded in part by USGS Priority Ecosystem Science, tested how water management decisions altered plant community biodiversity compared to tidal wetlands along a salinity gradient in the SF Bay-Delta, CA, USA.  We quantified diversity from plot to region spatial scales. The resulting manuscript was published in Ecosphere (Jones et al. 2021). 

Rare plant distribution and abundance

Soft Salty Bird's-Beak. This project, funded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, quantified the distribution, abundance, and genetic diversity of Soft Salty Bird's-Beak (Chloropyron molle subsp. molle). We are working on the resulting manuscripts now. 

​Antioch Dunes Evening Primrose. This project, funded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, quantified the distribution, abundance, and genetic diversity of the Antioch Dunes Evening Primrose (Oenothera deltoides subsp. howellii) in the SF Bay-Delta, CA, USA. During field work, the project also expanded to investigate a putative new taxon in the O. deltoides clade. We published a USGS Open File Report (Thorne & Vandergast 2021) summarizing the project, and an ecological manuscript in Biological Invasions (Jones et al. 2021). We are currently revising a subspecies description for the new taxon.