Advancing Predictions of Ecosystem Responses - a Warren Lecture with Xue Feng
Advancing Predictions of Ecosystem Responses through Ecohydrological Feedbacks
Abstract: Many ecosystems around the world are increasingly affected by climate change. The lifeforms within those ecosystems take up, store, and use carbon for growth and maintenance, such as plants that photosynthesize, or microbes that decompose soil carbon. Importantly, their metabolism and function are controlled by water. As a result, the ecohydrological processes that make water accessible to these lifeforms will not only control ecosystem responses, but also their contributions to climate change, by regulating how much carbon is released back into the atmosphere as greenhouse gasses.
My research group aims to quantitatively uncover how water shapes ecosystem response to climate change and use this knowledge to advance Earth system and watershed predictions. Understanding water-carbon interactions at the ecosystem scale is complicated by the variability of water across multiple timescales and the nonlinear responses to water across multiple spatial scales. In this presentation, I elaborate on our work in three contexts: (i) the hydrological controls on peatland carbon emissions, (ii) plant hydraulic regulation and forest responses to drought, and (iii) vegetation impacts on urban hydrology. Using statistical, computational, observational, and analytical tools, our work has shed light on ecohydrological feedbacks at local scales and improved carbon and water flux predictions at ecosystem scales.
Xue Feng is a McKnight Land-Grant Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geo- Engineering, University of Minnesota. Feng conducts research at the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory.