A person sets up a transparent research box on a sunny grassy hillside as part of the UM Lab’s ongoing Ecosystem Ecology studies, while two others work further up the slope under a blue sky with scattered clouds.

Welcome to the Classen Lab

The Ecosystem Ecology & Environmental Change Group

We work at the boundary of ecosystem and community ecology, asking how environmental change reorganizes biological communities and what that reorganization means for ecosystem function. A recurring theme in our work is that ecosystem outcomes are associated with the structure of biological and abiotic interactions, not rates alone, and that apparent stability can mask substantial change underneath. Our research spans long-term warming experiments, distributed field networks, and model-data integration, from old fields in the American South to subarctic tundra in Sweden and montane meadows in the Rockies. The lab is led by Aimée Classen, Director of the University of Michigan Biological Station and Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and our work is deeply collaborative, spanning partners across the United States, Sweden, China, New Zealand, Australia, Argentina, and more.

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