September 2011

Forest carbon cycle responses to atmospheric and environmental change

Environmental scientists are challenged to understand the effects of a range of environmental perturbations to the Earth system from global phenomena like climatic or atmospheric change to land use transformations. Ecologists can also observe, collect, record and store more data, more frequently and more extensively than ever before. One approach to address these problems and opportunities is to fuse observations with mathematical models to infer responses to environmental change. The seminar will introduce some of the projects I've been working on in the last few years.

Extracting insight on forest carbon cycles through observations and modeling

I will describe some of the observational approaches we have deployed to measure the net rate of carbon dioxide exchange between a forest ecosystem and the atmosphere. The observed net exchange of CO₂ represents the sum of several components of gross CO₂ exchange, which in turn represent fundamental tree and soil metabolic processes. One challenge we have had is: how do we extract insight about how these component processes might be responding to environmental change at various scales from an observed time series?