Jeannine Cavender-Bares

Jeannine Cavender-Bares is a professor at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Ecology, Evolution & Behavior. Her research integrates evolutionary biology, ecology, and physiology by studying the functional traits of plants, with a particular focus on oaks.
Early life and education.
Cavender-Bares grew up in Athens, Ohio. She received her B.A. in environmental sciences from Cornell University in 1990, her Masters in Forestry and Global Change from Yale University in 1992 and her PhD from Harvard University in 2000. At Harvard Jeannine worked with Fakhri A. Bazzaz and studied the physiological and evolutionary ecology of oaks (Quercus). She then worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center with Catherine E. Lovelock and at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Montpellier with Serge Rambal and Richard Joffre.
Career and research.
She is a leading researcher in the field of 'eco-phylogenetics' or 'community phylogenetics' (her review has been cited over 1500 times), and organized a special issue of the journal "Ecology" on that topic. Cavender-Bares' research group uses concepts from the evolutionary history of plant physiology to understand how ecosystems function in the face of global climate change.
Cavender-Bares was one of the coordinating lead authors of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report for the Americas. The IPBES is an independent intergovernmental body supported by multiple nations with the mission to "strengthen the science-policy interface for biodiversity and ecosystem services for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, long-term human well-being and sustainable development." In 2016, she helped launch the Oaks of the Americas Conservation Network, which promotes the protection of oak species across North America.
She was a principal investigator of the NSF/NASA Dimensions of biodiversity project "Linking remotely sensed optical diversity to genetic, phylogenetic and functional diversity to predict ecosystem processes" and lead editor for the open access book "Remote Sensing of Plant Biodiversity". She is the Director of an NSF-funded biology integration institute ASCEND on using spectral biology and predictive models for the study of biodiversity and global change.
Publications.
As of 2020, Jeannine has published over 140 peer-reviewed journal articles or international assessments and 10 book chapters that have been cited over 20,000 times.
As indexed by Google scholar her most cited papers as first author are: