Miles Silman
My primary interests are community composition and dynamics of Andean and Amazonian tree communities in both space and time. The lab’s current research focuses on combining modern- and paleoecology to understand tree distributions and plant-climate relationships in the Andes and Amazon. The work is focused on the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes and the adjacent Amazonian plain, with a particular emphasis in distributions along environmental gradients, be they in space or time, and includes both empirical work and modeling. Our main study site now is a 3 km altitudinal transect from tree line to the Amazon plain in SE Peru, and we have 27 years of experience in the western Amazon and Andes.
Other studies include experimental work on tree life history and tropical tree community structure, plant-animal interactions and biodiversity maintenance in tropical forests, large-scale analyses of tree species composition in Amazonia, and inverse modeling of climate from plant community composition.