Templer and her lab work around the world, investigating different disturbances on terrestrial ecosystems in different places. These include: temperate forest in the northeast of the United States, tropical forests in Mexico, and urban areas throughout the Greater Boston Area. Much of Templer's work investigating how forests are and will respond to warming and other chronic disturbances takes place at Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, a long term ecological research site in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Templer specifically looks at a changing climate in the White Mountains and tries create conditions that the forest may experience within the next century by heating the soil using space heaters and clearing off snow. Under warming conditions there is less snow so soils actually get colder (snow acts as a blanket for soils, insulating them in the winter), leading to freezing of the soil microbe community and changing the way carbon and nutrients are cycled in the forest floor. For example, along with Anne Socci, she found that a smaller snowpack leads to greater soil frost, reducing nitrogen uptake rates in sugar maple trees. Templer also examines how reactive nitrogen in atmospheric deposition varies spatially across forest ecosystems in the northeast with colleague Kathleen Weathers
