Forums | HES 健康与环境科学

02 May 2024, 8:48 PM

[XJTLU Science Talk]

Speaker: Prof. Scott Saleska, Professor, University of Arizona

Host: Dr. Yaoqi Li

Date: 2024-05-06

Time: 2:00-3:00 pm

Room: HSG23

Title: The biogeography of Amazon forest vulnerability and resilience to droughts

Abstract:

Amazon tropical forests are the largest on earth, but Amazon carbon sinks for atmospheric CO2 appear to be declining in association with deforestation and climate change-associated droughts, threatening to push forests past a tipping point towards forest collapse. Better understanding of forest responses to drought are urgently needed, but past responses have been complex and heterogeneous across landscapes, including both substantial positive (photosynthetic “greening”) and negative (browning and tree mortality) responses that are difficult to explain by climate forcing alone. Here, I will present a new approach for combining forest plot data and remote-sensing of Amazon forest photosynthetic response with ground-based tree demography to identify a "biogeography" of Amazon forest drought response that emerges from different forest ecotypes across the basin. This new functional biogeography of drought response provides a framework for conservation decisions and improved predictions of complex forest responses to future climate changes, and that longer and more frequent droughts are undermining ecohydrological strategies and capacities for Amazon forest resilience.

Brief Bio:

• Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, US; Director, Landscape Evolution Observatory of Biosphere 2; Co-Director, NSF NRT BRIDGES – Ecosystem Genomics.
• BS (1986) in Physics (minor: Electrical Engineering) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ph.D. (1998) in Energy and Resources from University of California. Post-doc in Earth & Planetary Sciences at Harvard University (1999-2001). Research Associate at Harvard University (2002-2004).
• Research areas: Geochemistry, Microbiology, Climatology. Vegetation-climate interactions, Carbon sequestration and Methane cycling from rainforest to permafrost. Authored >400 peer-reviewed journal articles; Totally citation: 20,364; H-index: 74 (Google Scholar). Elected Fellow of the Ecological Society of America (2019).

More information about Prof. Saleska can be found here or on Google Scholar.

For online audiences: please join us with Tencent Meeting (ID: 616-775-136)

I look forward to seeing you there!

Best Regards,

Lu