Faculty Profiles

Jason Martina is an assistant professor at Texas State University in San Marcos, TX (started fall 2019). His primary research interests involve better understanding global change phenomena in wetland and grassland ecosystems. Before coming to Texas State, he was the program coordinator of the EEB and ABS programs at Texas A&M University and an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Ecosystem Science and Management. He received his Ph.D. at Michigan State University with Drs. Steve Hamilton and Merritt Turetsky and completed a postdoc at the University of Michigan with Drs. Deborah Goldberg and Bill Currie.

We study global change in wetlands and grasslands. We use field, laboratory and computational modeling techniques to test hypotheses concerning some of the most important drivers of global change, such as biological invasion, nitrogen deposition and climate change. We look at plant invasions holistically, from the species traits and external drivers that allow these aggressive species to dominant, to what effects their dominance has on the ecosystem, with the overall goal of using newly gained information to manage their populations and restore invaded ecosystems. While we mainly focus on the causes and consequences of biological invasion, we also study nutrient pollution, disturbance, endangered species and restoration of degraded ecosystems.

Some questions we address include: How do global change drivers (such as eutrophication, disturbance, etc.) affect plant community composition? Why do certain species become invasive? What physiological, reproductive, and morphological traits allow for their competitive superiority? What are the consequences of invasion to the native biota and how do these changes affect nutrient cycling and carbon storage? What restoration techniques best control their populations?