Our research is focused on understanding the drivers of biogeochemical variation among terrestrial ecosystems, and mostly in the tropics. Ecosystem ecologists and biogeochemists have long recognized that tropical systems function differently than their temperate counterparts, and exhibit remarkable biogeochemical heterogeneity. As the community has worked to develop a framework for explaining the causes of this variability, most investigators have taken one of two general approaches: parsing out underlying drivers from observed spatial patterns across large regions, or isolating single drivers of ecosystem properties with less emphasis on scaling up to broader regions. Our group seeks to do both simultaneously, an approach we believe will help quantify and explain the biogeochemical diversity that typifies tropical ecosystems. Part of the group works in unmanaged forests, and another on how tropical soils may mediate the consequences of rapidly-expanding industrial-scale agricult