“Plants can’t move when times get tough,” Emily Wedel, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame, frequently reminds people. In her field of plant ecology, she analyzes strategies that plants implement to survive in stressful conditions and harsh environments.
“As ecologists, we’re primarily interested in trying to predict how plant communities are going to change under environmental change,” said Wedel, who works in the laboratory of Tyler Coverdale, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. “We can use those resource-use strategies that plants have to try and understand what’s going to happen to these communities.”
Wedel credits an inherent appreciation for the interconnectedness of nature and a lifelong love of the outdoors for driving her to study ecology. “As a kid I was known for never wearing shoes,” she joked.
She emphasized that developing an appreciation for the ecosystem she grew up in, the tallgrass prairies of Kansas, was a catalyst for her introduction into research with her undergraduate advisor, Jon Piper, now professor emeritus in the biology program at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas.
As a doctoral student at Kansas State University, Wedel conducted research in South Africa, where her work focused on how savanna plant communities respond to variable rainfall regimes. At Notre Dame, she is studying how large mammalian herbivores, such as elephants, affect savanna plant communities. Wedel offered a few questions that form the bedrock of her new work.
“How do herbivores affect plant communities? How does the loss of large herbivores change the way that savannas work? And then how does [herbivory] interact with resource availability?” she said.
While most of her time is spent on campus, Wedel prefers to study in the field. She has conducted her research in local regions like the tallgrass prairies of Northern Indiana but mostly focuses on the semi-arid savannas of South Africa and Kenya.
“A lot of savanna ecology is focused around understanding what drives how much tree cover there is versus grass cover … and then how large herbivores influence those dynamics,” Wedel said.
During her work in the field, Wedel outlined some common challenges she combated.
In one case, she recalled an experiment where her team constructed an irrigation system to inundate plants in drier environments with an ample water supply. However, the region she was studying experienced an extremely rainy season, which threatened to overshadow the manipulations they had applied, although they did see some treatment differences.
“Plant ecologists often joke that if you are setting up a rainfall manipulation experiment (drought shelters to exclude rain, or irrigation to add water) you will likely receive an unexpectedly dry or wet year that overshadows the manipulations,” she said.
In her recent studies, she provided methods to gauge herbivore impact. The team used previously established herbivore exclosures in central Kenya to study how tree growth and physiology changes when herbivores could not reach the trees. Wedel emphasized that even with data collection strategies in place, the results can take time and still be unpredictable.
“It might not be the story you were expecting to tell,” she said. “But another important part of ecological research is how long term it is, so that means putting up these manipulations and keeping them going for as long as you can … to try and tease apart patterns over time, rather than [responses to] one freak event.”
Wedel arrived at the University in 2024 and has already begun extensive research. She noted that the transition from Kansas to Notre Dame was relatively easy, claiming that “Indiana’s the same, just with more trees.”
She met Coverdale at a scientific conference in Kruger National Park in South Africa and realized they shared similar research interests, including a love for field work in savannas.
Coverdale characterized the pair’s work as complementary, with Wedel fixated on the “nitty-gritty details” of organisms and their internal functions, while he explores factors that affect the ecosystem as a whole, like what savannas could look like without elephants or giraffes, or without any herbivores at all.
Longitudinal experiments, lasting upwards of 15 years, have proved invaluable in understanding Coverdale’s questions. He and Wedel are currently drafting a database which organizes these studies into an easily accessible source.
Wedel spent six weeks of her summer in 2025 at the Mpala Research Center in the savanna ecosystem of central Kenya. The goal of the project is to integrate plant physiology, long-term plant demographic data, and remote-sensing to understand how rainfall and plant-eating animals interact to shape savanna tree cover — from individual trees to landscape scales.
“This summer, I measured tree gas exchange and water potential, an indicator of water stress, to assess how tree species differ in their resource-use strategies across rainfall and herbivory gradients,” she said.
The site also offers two decades of data on ecosystems without herbivore presence, to the benefit of Wedel and all researchers with a similar passion for ecological health and sustainability.
Gray Nocjar is a junior electrical engineering major with minors in energy studies and journalism.