March 2015

The artists of the current exhibit in the Bannister Building, Marking Time to a Changing Climate, will describe their work.

Please note that there is a public tour of the art exhibit in the half hour before the talks.

A major goal of current environmental change research is to add more realism to projections of ecosystem functioning in a warming world. This requires a large-scale understanding of plant responses to climate variability and change. Forests in particular are a major player in the coupled biosphere-climate system and critically determine terrestrial carbon cycling. Studying tree growth on multiple spatiotemporal scales is thus a prerequisite to develop robust benchmarks e.g. for vegetation model simulations of forest productivity.

Direct measures of forest wood production are often based on measures of individual tree growth along the stem, often taken at a single height: basal height (1.3 meters). This assumes that a measurement of wood production at a single height is representative of wood production along the whole stem. In violation of this assumption, it is known that trees do accumulate wood differentially along the stem.

The fate of forests in a warming world is of major ecological, societal, and economic concern. Forests play a key role in the combined carbon-water-nutrient cycle, including important ecosystem services and feedbacks to the climate system. Historically, forests have been an important carbon sink because of an excess of net primary production (NPP) compared to ecosystem respiration, but the future of this carbon sink is increasingly in question, as NPP may decline in a warming world.