My name is Paul Grogan and I am a professor of Plant and Terrestrial Ecosystem Ecology in the Department of Biology at Queen’s University.
I received my Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 1998. My area of study was ecosystem-level perspectives on carbon and nutrient cycling below ground, which I did partially at the Institute of Arctic Biology, Toolik and Sagwon Field Stations, in Alaska and also at Point Reyes National Seashore in California. I was awarded an E.U. Marie Curie fellowship in July of 1998 and did extensive fieldwork in Abisko, Sweden as a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark under the guidance of Sven Jonasson. After that, I was a Lecturer at Cranfield University in Bedfordshire, England, before joining Queen’s in 2003. I was awarded a Canada Research Chair (II) in the ecology of arctic ecosystems and their sensitivity to climate change from 2003-2013.
My research generally focuses on species’ interactions with each other, and with their physical environment, all as parts of an integrated system. What that means more specifically is that there are a variety of physical, chemical, as well as biological factors influencing an ecosystem’s functioning, and I look at how they interact, and what sort of impacts these inter-relationships have on the environment.
The ecosystem-level perspective is a relatively new and rapidly advancing area of research that stresses the interconnected nature of our planet. Humans and our activities are an inherent part of ecosystems, and therefore ecosystem-level ecological perspectives and methodologies are at the heart of much of the global change research agenda.
The value of this research lies in its ability to directly aid our understanding of issues such as land use and land management, impacts of climate change and related mitigation strategies, the functional significance of biodiversity, and assessments of sustainable resource use from both environmental and socio-economic perspectives.