Global Environmental Change Early- and Mid-career Award Webinar Series – I
Global Environmental Change Section Presents three Early Career Awards and Piers J. Seller Mid-Career Award each year to recognize the outstanding contribution from early/mid-career section members in the field of global environmental change. This Award Lecture series will feature and celebrate award recipients’ work. We invite all AGU community members to join us for this lecture series.
The first lecture series features two 2021 Global Environmental Change Early Career Award recipients – Dr. Alexandra G. Konings (Stanford University) and Dr. Kimberly A. Novick (Indiana University Bloomington).
"Microwave Remote Sensing of Plant Water Stress Response" (Dr. Alexandra Konings)
Understanding how vegetation responds to increasingly frequent and intense droughts is a fundamental prerequisite for characterizing the response of the global carbon cycle to a changing hydroclimate. However, doing so is challenging because of the large diversity of relevant vegetation traits (including root, xylem, and stomatal properties) within species, within ecosystems, and across the globe. In this talk, I will describe how microwave remote sensing of vegetation – which naturally integrates over these sources of variability and provides data across the globe - may be a useful tool for better understanding plant water stress response. I will describe how microwave observations of vegetation water content are conceptually related to both biomass and leaf water potential. Although several unknowns limit the ability to directly invert leaf water potential from microwave remote sensing observations, I will illustrate several approaches for nevertheless being able to use these datasets to characterize plant responses to water stress. I will discuss several applications, including determining ecosystem-scale plant hydraulic traits (including isohydricity, stomatal closure, P50, and xylem closure) and their link to spatial variability in photosynthesis responses to water stress, estimating drought-driven tree mortality rates, and understanding how vegetation water stress response affects wildfire risk.
"Opportunities for more robust assessments of Nature-Based Climate Solutions in the United States" (Dr. Kimberly Novick)
Most pathways for avoiding the worst impacts of climate change require removal of CO2 from the atmosphere, for example with managed alterations to ecosystems including reforestation and crop diversification. These so-called “Nature-Based Climate Solutions” (NbCS) have growing private and public sector support, despite being characterized by substantial mechanistic uncertainty. This talk will identify knowledge gaps surrounding NbCS that may be confronted, over the short term, with pre-existing data and analysis tools that have long been used to understand the mechanisms driving ecosystem carbon cycling.