Hi there, I'm Max Larter, welcome to my personal website!

I am a plant ecophysiologist and an evolutionary biologist. My primary research interest is understanding how plants adapt to their environment, and in particular in the face of climate change, with rapidly changing temperature and rainfall patterns. By examining trait distributions of living and extinct lineages, we can gain insight into how key physiological traits have evolved in the past, and what genetic mechanisms enabled that variation. It's becoming rapidly critical to transferring that knowledge into predicting the impacts of climate change on the distributions of wild species and crop health.

More broadly, I'm interested in using combinations of physiological and morphological traits, ecological and climatic data in an evolutionary framework to try and answer cool questions.

Drought and cold stress

I'm currently doing a post-doc in Sylvain Delzon's lab in Bordeaux, in collaboration with Guillaume Charrier , on an ANR project led by Georges Kunstler. This project aims to improve our understanding of tree species distributions using a combination of trait data, climate and demographic models. Functional traits related to drought and frost tolerance determine species range limits, so my role is to collate trait databases for these traits for as many species as we can, and add measurments where needed.

I'm currently looking for students (Bsc. and Msc.)!

Evolution of drought tolerance, xylem anatomy of trees

Contact me for more details, or if you'd like to work with me on another topic.

Credits

I made this website with very little knowledge of how github pages or html work, using Auriel Fournier's site as inspiration (based on Barry Clark's work here).