Sara Kuebbing

• Ph.D.
• PostDoc Position at Yale University

Forests provide multiple benefits that include sequestering carbon, supporting biodiversity, and providing wood products. Managing temperate forests to achieve these benefits sustainably is challenging given the legacy of past human impacts, the complexity of forest development, and increasing but unpredictable disturbances. These intricacies promp...

Forests have substantial potential to help mitigate climate change. Private finance channeled through carbon credits is one way to fund that mitigation, but market‐based approaches to forest carbon projects have been fraught to date. Public skepticism of forest carbon markets signals a need to closely scrutinize the system for certifying carbon cre...

We identify the critical need for causal approaches to be employed at the scale of commercial agriculture to build high-quality evidence for measurement, monitoring, reporting and verification (MMRV) to quantify the effectiveness of soil carbon farming.We emphasize that, contrary to arguments that have led to reliance on process-based biogeochemica...

Recent work has questioned the credibility of forest carbon offsets as an environmental intervention and nature-based solution for mitigating climate change. Despite some updates to carbon credit methodologies and advice to purchase only high-integrity or high-quality credits, it is not clear which carbon offsets meet these standards under which co...

Voluntary markets for agricultural carbon credits are expanding, promoting climate-smart practices purported to increase soil carbon and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. To contribute effectively to climate mitigation, markets must deliver credits that meet international standards guaranteeing credits are additional, conservative, and equivalent to...

Recent work has questioned the credibility of forest carbon offsets as an environmental intervention and nature-based solution for mitigating climate change. Despite some updates to carbon credit methodologies and advice to purchase only high-integrity or high-quality credits, it is not clear which carbon offsets meet these standards under which co...

Background Plants often shift their phenology in response to climate warming, with potentially important ecological consequences. Relative differences in the abilities of native and nonnative plants to track warming temperatures by adjusting their phenologies could have cascading consequences for ecosystems. Our general understanding of nonnative s...

Shifting community assembly dynamics are an underappreciated mechanism by which warming will alter plant community composition. Germination timing (which can determine the order in which seedlings emerge within a community) will likely shift unevenly across species in response to warming. In seasonal environments where communities reassemble at the...

The success of plant species under climate change will be determined, in part, by their phenological responses to temperature. Despite the growing need to forecast such outcomes across entire species ranges, it remains unclear how phenological sensitivity to temperature might vary across individuals of the same species. In this study, we harnessed...

Tropical dry forests (TDF) are among the most‐threatened terrestrial ecosystems, experiencing ongoing conversion to agricultural fields, pasture, and human settlements. Human disturbances are often precursors to invasion of ecosystems by non‐native species, but research on invasion patterns in tropical ecosystems is sparse, and there is no comprehe...

Why nonnative invasive plant species commonly co‐occur, despite their competitive superiority and propensity to displace native species, remains a paradox in invasion biology. Negative interactions among competitively dominant invaders are potentially alleviated by two understudied mechanisms: seasonal priority effects, where phenological separatio...

The opportunity of agricultural management practices to sequester soil organic carbon (SOC) is recognized as an important strategy for mitigating climate change. However, there is low confidence when it comes to understanding the magnitude of the climate benefit we can expect from SOC sequestration or how best to achieve it. Several issues are ofte...

Premise The herbaceous layer accounts for the majority of plant biodiversity in eastern North American forests, encompassing substantial variation in life history strategy and function. One group of early‐season herbaceous understory species, colloquially referred to as spring ephemeral wildflowers, are ecologically and culturally important, but li...

Communities worldwide are losing multiple species at an unprecedented rate, but how communities reassemble after these losses is often an open question. It is well established that the order and timing of species arrival during community assembly shapes forthcoming community composition and function. Yet, whether the order and timing of species los...

The herbaceous layer accounts for the majority of plant biodiversity in eastern North American forests, encompassing substantial variation in life history strategy and function. One group of early season herbaceous understory species, colloquially referred to as "spring ephemeral wildflowers", are of particular ecological and cultural importance. D...

There is disagreement about the potential for regenerative management practices to sequester sufficient soil organic carbon (SOC) to help mitigate climate change. Measuring change in SOC stocks following practice adoption at the grain of farm fields, within the extent of regional agriculture, could help resolve this disagreement. Yet sampling deman...

Wood decomposition is regulated by multiple controls, including climate and wood traits, that vary at local to regional scales. Yet decomposition rates differ dramatically when these controls do not. Fungal community dynamics are often invoked to explain these differences, suggesting that knowledge of ecosystem properties that influence fungal comm...

Natural areas are commonly managed for multiple purposes, including both conservation and recreational use. Hiking trails are an extremely common feature in natural areas that enable recreational use, but trail construction and use can also facilitate the spread of non‐native species by altering trailside conditions, creating disturbances, and acti...

Temperate understory plant species are at risk from climate change and anthropogenic threats that include increased deer herbivory, habitat loss, pollinator declines and mismatch, and nutrient pollution. Recent work suggests that spring ephemeral wildflowers may be at additional risk due to phenological mismatch with deciduous canopy trees. The stu...

Deciduous trees, shrubs and forest wildflowers may be advancing their leaf‐out phenology at different rates in response to a warming climate. A mismatch between understory and overstory phenology may lead to a reduction of understory light levels in the early spring, which is a critical period when many spring‐blooming wildflowers achieve highest p...

Nonnative plants may shift community composition and reduce diversity through competition with native neighbors, or invasion patterns may reflect edaphic gradients that create suitable habitat for colonization. We tested the impacts of invasive Reynoutria japonica (Japanese knotweed) on performance of a co-occurring native plant, Symplocarpus foeti...

Temperate understory plant species are at risk from climate change and anthropogenic threats that include increased deer herbivory, habitat loss, pollinator declines and mismatch, and nutrient pollution. Recent work suggests that spring ephemeral wildflowers may be at additional risk due to phenological mismatch with deciduous canopy trees. The stu...

Field research can be an important component of the career trajectories for researchers in numerous academic fields; however, conducting research in field settings poses risks to health and safety, and researchers from marginalized groups often face greater risks than those experienced by other researchers in their fields; If these additional risks...

Ericoid mycorrhizal (ErM) shrubs commonly occur in forest understories and could therefore alter arbuscular (AM) and/or ectomycorrhizal (EcM) tree effects on soil carbon and nitrogen dynamics. Specifically, ErM fungi have extensive organic matter decay capabilities, and ErM plant and fungal tissues have high concentrations of secondary compounds th...

Societal Impact Statement The practice of writing science blogs benefits both the scientist and society alike by providing professional development opportunities and delivering information in a format that is accessible to large and diverse audiences. By designing a project that introduced upper‐level undergraduate students to science blog writing...

Facilitation by nurse plants shapes community development during primary succession. Human activity—especially in urban settings—has created environments like abandoned lots or post-industrial waste sites in which primary succession occurs. The importance of facilitation in these stressful urban habitats is likely pronounced. There is evidence that...

Difficulties quantifying pathogen load and mutualist abundance limit our ability to connect disease dynamics to host community ecology. For example, specific predictions about how differential pathogen load is hypothesised to drive host competitive outcomes are rarely tested. Additionally, although infection is known to affect mutualists, we rarely...

Community science image libraries offer a massive, but largely untapped, source of observational data for phenological research. The iNaturalist platform offers a particularly rich archive, containing more than 49 million verifiable, georeferenced, open access images, encompassing seven continents and over 278,000 species. A critical limitation pre...

The editorial board of this journal, Biological Invasions, aims to publish research that informs understanding of the patterns and processes of invasions and discussion of relevant policy and conservation issues related to controlling invasions. Because the scope of the journal's interests is global, building an editorial board that represents the...

Context The relationship between native and non-native species richness is influenced by drivers including disturbance history and environmental character. Disturbance influences native-exotic richness relationships (NERRs) and results in positive or negative relationships, depending on its intensity. Land-use history can be used to understand how...

Most biological invasion literature—including syntheses and meta-analyses and the resulting theory—is reported from temperate regions, drawing only minimally from the tropics except for some island systems. The lack of attention to invasions in the tropics results from and reinforces the assumption that tropical ecosystems, and especially the conti...

Plant–fungal associations strongly influence forest carbon and nitrogen cycling. The prevailing framework for understanding these relationships is through the relative abundance of arbuscular (AM) versus ectomycorrhizal (EcM) trees. Ericoid mycorrhizal (ErM) shrubs are also common in forests and interactions between co‐occurring ErM shrubs and AM a...

As urbanization increases worldwide, investments in nature‐based solutions that aim to mitigate urban stressors and counter the impacts of global climate change are also on the rise. Tree planting on degraded urban lands—or afforestation—is one form of nature‐based solution that has been increasingly implemented in cities around the world. The bene...

The fields of ecology and conservation have evolved rapidly over the past century. Synthesizing larger trends in these disciplines remains a challenge yet is critical to bridging subdisciplines, guiding research, and informing educational frameworks. Here, we provide what we believe is the largest full‐text culturomic analysis of ecology and conser...

The coronavirus pandemic is more fully exposing ubiquitous economic and social inequities that pervade conservation science. In this time of prolonged stress on members of the research community, primary investigators or project leaders (PLs) have a unique opportunity to adapt their programs to jointly create more equitable and productive research...

Lianas (woody vines) are a leading concern in urban forest management given their ability to reduce the growth rate and survival of trees. Efforts to control invasive lianas are widespread, yet forests are often reinvaded following management. Changes in soil nutrient availability could help explain why some forests are susceptible to reinvasion. S...

Invasive plant effects on litter decomposition tend to be idiosyncratic among species and ecosystems, which may arise from variation in the invader’s relative abundance (mass ratio effect), from its relative functional difference to other species (trait divergence effect) and/or from species’ litter mixing that causes non‐additive decomposition rat...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) is primarily formed from plant inputs, but the relative carbon (C) contributions from living root inputs (i.e. rhizodeposits) vs litter inputs (i.e. root + shoot litter) are poorly understood. Recent theory suggests that living root inputs exert a disproportionate influence on SOC formation, but few field studies have expl...

Long-term research in ecology and evolution (LTREE) is considered fundamental for understanding complex ecological and evolutionary dynamics. However, others have argued for revision of LTREE efforts given perceived limitations in current research priorities and approaches. Yet most arguments about the benefits and failings of LTREE could be argued...

Human activity is creating a global footprint by changing the climate, altering habitats and reshuffling the distribution of species. The movement of species around the globe has led to the naturalization and accumulation of multiple non-native species within ecosystems, which is frequently associated with habitat disturbance and changing environme...

Although the co-occurrence of nonnative vertebrates is a ubiquitous global phenomenon, the study of interactions between invaders is poorly represented in the literature. Limited understanding of the interactions between co-occurring vertebrates can be problematic for predicting how the removal of only one invasive—a common management scenario—will...

Literature Search Literature search: search terms use in a Web of Science® search for peer-reviewed studies on the impacts of removal a single invasive vertebrate species on native biodiversity. Details of the search conducted on the basis of genus of the terrestrial vertebrates invasive species reported among the 100 most damaging invasive species...

List of species and reference used for the analysis

Funnel plot analysis of sample size against the Hedges’ d value

Results from the reduced dataset* to test for issues of pseudoreplication

Extracted data used in meta-analysis

To maximize limited conservation funds and prioritize management projects that are likely to succeed, accurate assessment of invasive nonnative species impacts is essential. A common challenge to prioritization is a limited knowledge of the difference between the impacts of a single nonnative species compared to the impacts of nonnative species whe...

Although the co-occurrence of nonnative vertebrates is a ubiquitous global phenomenon, the study of interactions between invaders is poorly represented in the literature. Limited understanding of the interactions between co-occurring vertebrates can be problematic for predicting how the removal of only one invasive—a common management scenario—will...

Although the co-occurrence of nonnative vertebrates is a ubiquitous global phenomenon, the study of interactions between invaders is poorly represented in the literature. Limited understanding of the interactions between co-occurring vertebrates can be problematic for predicting how the removal of only one invasive—a common management scenario—will...

Although many plant communities are invaded by multiple nonnative species, we have limited information on how a species' origin affects ecosystem function. We tested how differences in species richness and origin affect productivity and seedling establishment. We created phylogenetically paired native and nonnative plant communities in a glasshouse...

Recent critics of invasion biology advocate reduced efforts against nonnative species, arguing that attempts to manage invasions are often costly and futile and that managers are indiscriminately managing species regardless of their impact. Whether this criticism has affected ground-level operations is unknown. A survey of land stewards of a major...

Ecosystems containing multiple nonnative plant species are common, but mechanisms promoting their co-occurrence are understudied. Plant-soil interactions contribute to the dominance of singleton species in nonnative ranges because many nonnatives experience stronger positive feedbacks relative to co-occurring natives. Plant-soil interactions could...

Background/Question/Methods nteractions among organisms can shape biogeochemical cycling. In fact many of the talks in this session explore this topic. These interactions, especially when embedded in different climates, can shape plant traits. Differences among individuals in plant traits, via differences in genotypes and phenotypes, can alter th...

The movement of species is one of the most pervasive forms of global change, and few ecosystems remain uninvaded by nonnative species. Studying species interactions is crucial for understanding their distribution and abundance, particularly for nonnative species because interactions may influence the probability of invasion and consequent ecologica...

Though co‐occurrence of invasive plant species is common, few studies have compared the community and ecosystem impacts of invaders when they occur alone and when they co‐occur. Prioritization of invasive species management efforts requires sufficient knowledge of impacts – both among individual invasive species and among different sets of co‐occur...

Background/Question/Methods Approximately one-third of forest invaders in the southeastern United States are woody shrub species. Many forests are invaded by multiple woody shrub species and little is known about the interactions of co-occurring invasive shrubs. Plant-soil feedbacks (PSF) are one mechanism explaining successful invasions. However...

AimsIn this study, we examine two common invasion biology hypotheses - biotic resistance and fluctuating resource availability - to explain the patterns of invasion of an invasive grass, Microstegium vimineum.Methods We used 13-year-old deer exclosures in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, USA, to examine how chronic disturbance by deer browsing...

a b s t r a c t Though biological invasion studies have proliferated in recent decades, a consistent emphasis remains on the study of single-species invasions. Here, we juxtapose the number of invasive plants reported as co-occurring within conservation habitats in one of the most comprehensive global conservation manage-ment databases (The Nature...

Managing invasive species is a current challenge for biodiversity conservation. A recurring recent suggestion is that by harvesting nonnatives for human consumption, people can control invasive populations. Even though humans may be able to control or eradicate certain populations of nonnative species by harvesting them as food sources, several cav...

Background/Question/Methods Co-occurring invasive plant species are increasingly common, and there is evidence that invader interactions affect future invasions. Plant-soil feedbacks (PSF) are one mechanism explaining successful plant invasions; non-native plants tend to create positive feedbacks when grown in soils cultivated by natives or consp...

Background/Question/Methods Invasive plant species often enter communities as passengers, yet later become drivers of community dynamics, ultimately altering the functioning of ecosystems. Early successional old fields are ideal for addressing both the susceptibility of communities to plant invasions, but also the impact plant invasions may have...

Background/Question/Methods: It is well recognized that invasive plant species affect native communities and ecosystems. It is less understood how co-occurring invasive plants might interact with one another, and how these interactions might change their impacts. Invasion rates and the likelihood of encountering multiple invasive species within a...