John Harte's research focuses on the effects of human actions on, and the linkages among, biodiversity, ecosystem structure and function, and climate. This work spans a range of scales, from plot to landscape to global, and utilizes field manipulation experiments, the analysis of patterns in nature, and mathematical modeling. Two specific current goals are to understand the extent to which ecosystem responses to climate change may result in feedbacks to climate that can either ameliorate or exacerbate global warming, and to develop, test, and apply to conservation issues, a general theory of the scaling properties of the distribution and abundance of species. The overarching goal of his work is to understand the interdependence of human well-being and the health of ecosystems.