Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Welcomes Jennifer Johnson to Faculty
LAWRENCE- Jennifer E. Johnson, Ph.D, has joined the University of Kansas’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology as an Assistant Professor of Plant Ecophysiology in the fall of 2024. Though she is still establishing her laboratory, Dr. Johnson began the fall semester by launching a new version of BIOL 606: Ecological Plant Physiology that focuses on the scaling of physiological processes within an Earth system context. The vision for the course grew out of Dr. Johnson’s background working with her mentors Joe Berry and Chris Field at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, CA. Global Ecology is a new discipline, and it got Johnson hooked on studying ecological processes and mechanisms at a continuum of spatial scales, up to the scale of the entire planet.
Johnson wrote, “For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by scaling – how patterns at large spatial scales and long temporal scales emerge from processes at finer spatial scales and shorter temporal scales. The environment at Carnegie’s Global Ecology department really cultivated this interest and focused it on photosynthesis, the process through which plants capture the energy from the sun and use it to fix carbon dioxide into sugars. Today, the two main questions that motivate my research are: How do the photosynthetic and respiratory processes work at a physiological level? And, how can we use this understanding to better measure and predict the aggregate photosynthetic and respiratory activities of the Earth’s biosphere?”
Johnson explained, “Today, photosynthetic and respiratory physiology are studied across an amazing range of scales. At the molecular end of the spectrum, the focus is on the biophysical and biochemical details of these processes; whereas at the global end of the spectrum, the focus is on how aggregated physiological fluxes impact the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles and climate system. The research program I am developing at KU aims at understanding the small-scale physiological mechanisms that hold promise for improving analysis of the aggregated physiological fluxes at larger scales. Currently, our projects are organized around chlorophyll fluorescence, a glow of light that plants emit during photosynthesis and that has recently been discovered to be measurable via satellites.”
“The processes that control the emission of fluorescence are widely conserved, all the way from phytoplankton to higher plants,” Johnson said, “and the ability to measure this signal from space is powerful because it creates an entirely new opportunity for remote monitoring of the productivity and the health of photosynthetic organisms in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. We're now seeing rapid advances in techniques for observing and monitoring fluorescence from laboratory, field, airborne, and satellite platforms; progress in basic research exploring the spatiotemporal variability of photosynthesis across scales, and how this relates to environmental resources and stressors; and many practical applications of fluorescence to issues of social significance, such as ecosystem monitoring in the context of food security, carbon cycling, and other ecosystem services.”
Johnson is looking forward to working with KU’s Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department, saying “The area that I am working in, Ecophysiology, is a specialty that is pretty integrative, and it connects to many different disciplines. In many cases, ecophysiologists can find homes in Plant Science departments, and in some cases in Earth Science departments. However, I was really excited to find an opportunity here within the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department because the unit has strengths in such a breadth of areas within the biological sciences. Ecophysiology is a sort connective tissue that links a lot of different scales of biology, and I am really enjoying being in an environment where there are colleagues working across the whole spectrum.”