Christopher Neill is an Associate Scientist at the MBL’s Ecosystems Center, leading research that strives to understand how changes in land use and other human activities alter the structure of ecosystems. Several of Dr. Neill’s research projects investigate the ecological consequences of deforestation of the world’s largest tropical rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon. He studies how deforestation changes the way water and dissolved and particulate materials move from land to water and within channels of streams and rivers. Dr. Neill also examines how forest clearing alters the rates of cycling of soil nutrients and organic matter and the emissions of carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides from soils to the atmosphere. Dr. Neill’s research group uses comparisons of gauged catchments, natural abundance of stable isotopes and field stable isotope additions, and paired hydrological and hydrochemical measurements. He also works on the ecology and restoration of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in coastal Massachusetts, where rapid increases in residential development threaten ecosystems that contain high and unique biological diversity. With colleagues at MBL and at The Nature Conservancy, Dr. Neill conducts large-scale management experiments that examine the effects of treatments, such as clearing or burning on these disturbance-dependent coastal sandplain grasslands and shrublands. In 2007 they initiated a new experiment to test methods for restoring old farmland to sandplain grassland on Martha’s Vineyard.
