Richard Thomas
Chair & Professor
Contact Information
Department of Biology
Life Sciences Building
53 Campus Drive
Morgantown, WV 26506-6040
Chair’s Office: (304) 293-6673
Research Office: (304) 293-1789
E-mail: rthomas@wvu.edu
Research Interests
Forest Ecosystems, Global Change, and Carbon Cycling
Global environmental change includes complex, interrelated phenomena such as greenhouse warming, stratospheric ozone depletion, tropical deforestation, loss of biodiversity, atmospheric nitrogen deposition, elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, and a host of other environmental changes. My research focuses on understanding how plants interact with a changing environment, both physical and biotic, and the physiological adaptations of plants to environmental stress. I am also interested in scaling plant physiological processes to the ecosystem level, for example, defining the role of nitrogen-fixing plants in ecosystem nitrogen balance.