Research

Interests

• Global Change Ecology (Land-use change; Climate Change; Invasion)
• Quantitative Community Ecology (Macroecology; Biodiversity metrics; Global Synthesis)
• Trait-based ecology (Predicting Trait Distributions; Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning)

Current Projects

Synthesizing the effects of human-mediated habitat loss on biodiversity

A primary goal of this working group is to understand how the anthropogenic processes that underpin biodiversity change influence the loss of species, traits, and ecosystem functions. The primary breakthrough in resolving this challenge is to disentangle the influence of passive sampling (via species-area relationships) and ecosystem decay (via species extinction in smaller habitats due to demographic processes) on multiple facets.

• More information

Related publications

• Gonçalves-Souza T, Chase J, Haddad N, …, Sanders NJ. (2025) Increasing species turnover does not alleviate biodiversity loss in fragmented landscapes. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08688-7
• Gonçalves-Souza T, …, Chase J. (2025) LANDFRAG: A dataset to investigate the effects of forest loss and fragmentation on biodiversity. Global Ecology and Biogeography. https://doi.org/10.1111/geb.70015
• Romero GQ, Gonçalves-Souza T, Kratina P, …, Roslin T. (2018) Global predation pressure redistribution under future climate change. Nature Climate Change 8:1087–1091. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0347-y

LASER - Life-cycle analysis synthesized with ecosystems and risk focused on sustainable forestry

Companies and governments increasingly deploy forest natural climate solutions (fNCS) to leverage the immense carbon capture and storage potential of forests. However, fundamental errors, oversimplifications, and inconsistencies in the carbon bookkeeping of fNCS mean that decision-makers often do not know if fNCS mitigate or exacerbate climate change. Assessments of fNCS commonly assert that carbon in forest biomass is quickly recaptured (carbon neutral) or stored indefinitely (carbon negative) and count forest regrowth after harvest as carbon sequestration. These assumptions ignore post-harvest carbon emissions from altered forest landscapes (e.g., soils), overlook that short-term emissions are not climate neutral because instantaneous radiative forcing is only gradually offset by forest regrowth, and double-count carbon capture that would have happened if forests were not harvested. Despite increasing focus on these shortcomings in academia, current carbon accounting standards still consider forest biomass is carbon neutral. Studies that do not make this assumption are aspatial, use simplistic forest carbon accounting models, or ignore growing risks from climate change. Moreover, the singular focus on carbon in assessments of fNCS overlooks the potential risks of fNCS to conservation efforts and local communities. As such, decision makers lack critical knowledge about the effectiveness and broader sustainability of fNCS.
This project addresses these gaps by pioneering a method to accurately quantify the stocks, flows, and emissions of forest (and fossil) carbon across the life-cycle of fNCS. This model, LASER (Life-cycle Analysis Synthesized with Ecology and Risk), is spatially-explicit and incorporates climate, ecological, and social risks to holistically assess the sustainability of fNCS. This model is applied to three fNCS - bioenergy, short-lived forest products, and timber - in Brazil, Canada, and the United States. To build LASER, the project team combines concepts and methods from forest ecology, industrial ecology, geospatial science, and political ecology.

• Collaborators: Benjamin Goldstein (PI), Kai Zhu (co-PI), Dimitrios Gounaridis, and Geoffrey Lewis

Opportunities

I welcome inquiries from prospective postdocs for this open call from IGCB. Email me with a short statement of interests.