[Enviro-lunch] Enviro-lunch seminar tomorrow (9/28): Benjamin Sulman, "Water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen: Understanding plant and soil responses to global change"

[Nate Bogie]

Dear all,

Please join us tomorrow for our speaker, Benjamin Sulman, research scholar
from Princeton University.



*Benjamin Sulman*

Princeton University

*Water, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen: Understanding plant and soil
responses to global change*



*Abstract*: Human alterations to the earth system through carbon dioxide
emissions are driving wide-reaching changes in climate and carbon cycling,
including warming temperatures, more frequent severe droughts, and more
rapid plant growth driven by rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2)
concentrations. I will present results focused on measuring and modeling
two important aspects of these global changes:

*Drought*: Droughts cause hydrological stress in plants in two ways: Drying
soils reduce water available for roots to take up, while rapid evaporation
rates due to hot temperatures and dry air cause stress to plant leaves.
Using more than ten years of eddy covariance flux measurements, we
disentangled the impacts of soil drying and atmospheric demand for
evaporation on plant responses to drought. These measurements demonstrated
that the acceleration of evaporation rates driven by warming temperatures
and drying air can impact ecosystem fluxes as much as declines in soil
water availability, and suggest that future warming will intensify drought
impacts on plant growth.

*CO2 fertilization and nitrogen*: Plants absorb CO2 from the atmosphere as
they grow, and also require nitrogen to build their tissues. Rising
atmospheric CO2 concentrations can accelerate plant growth, but it is
uncertain how much nitrogen availability will limit how much carbon plants
can remove from the atmosphere in the future. We developed a new
global-scale ecosystem model that includes multiple strategies that plants
can use to acquire nitrogen, including partnering with fungi to extract
more nitrogen from organic materials by accelerating their decay and
converting atmospheric nitrogen into growth-supporting forms. Simulations
using the new model showed that changes in nitrogen acquisition strategies
could allow ecosystems to absorb more carbon than previous models have
projected.



*Biography*: Benjamin Sulman is an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton
University, working with the land model group at the Geophysical Fluid
Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), a climate modeling center funded by the
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). He has
previously conducted research using ecosystem models and eddy covariance
ecosystem flux measurements at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and
Indiana University.



When: Sep. 28st, Thursday, 12pm – 1pm

Where: SE2-302



Coffee will be provided and please bring your own mugs.

We look forward to seeing you,



Organizers for 2017-18: Nate Bogie and Lixia Jin

Faculty coordinator: Asmeret Asefaw Berhe

_______________________________________________
Enviro-lunch mailing list
Enviro-lunch at lists.ucmerced.edu
http://lists.ucmerced.edu/mailman/listinfo/enviro-lunch
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ucmerced.edu/pipermail/enviro-lunch/attachments/20170927/714ab002/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Sulman cropped 2.jpeg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 23413 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.ucmerced.edu/pipermail/enviro-lunch/attachments/20170927/714ab002/attachment-0001.jpeg>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: PastedGraphic-1.png
Type: image/png
Size: 25776 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.ucmerced.edu/pipermail/enviro-lunch/attachments/20170927/714ab002/attachment-0001.png>