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Polar Hands-On Laboratory Faculty
Gaius Shaver is a Senior Scientist at the MBL’s Ecosystems Center. He researches plant growth and nutrition, and the role of plants in ecosystem element cycles. For many years Dr. Shaver has focused his research on Alaskan tundra ecosystems, where low temperatures, low light intensities, low nutrient availability, and a short growing season all interact to limit plant growth. In this work he has compared and evaluated the relative importance of these limiting factors in different kinds of tundra, in different plant growth forms, and over a range of time and space scales. Dr. Shaver’s current focus is on a series of long-term, whole-ecosystem experiments at the Arctic LTER at Toolik Lake, Alaska. In these experiments, he has followed responses of the vegetation to treatments such as fertilizer addition, artificial shading, and increased air temperature for as long as 15 years. The results of these experiments are of general importance because they have shown how initial responses to a change of environment are often not sustained in the long-term, due mainly to changes in competitive interactions among species in the tundra community. Tundra ecosystems, with their low species diversity, small plant stature, and relatively fine-grained spatial heterogeniety are excellent model systems for the study of interaction between the physical, chemical, and biotic components of the environment in regulating plant growth and abundance. A second major component of Dr. Shaver’s research is the regulation of terrestrial carbon accumulation and exchanges of carbon with the atmosphere. Much of this work involves the use of computer simulation models, working at a range of scales from an experimental plot in Alaska to whole continents to the entire globe.
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