We seek to improve our understanding of global change in terrestrial ecosystems. We use remote sensing data, atmospheric trace gas observations, field measurements, and models in new ways to study feedbacks between terrestrial ecosystems and climate.

We are currently working on the following:

• Feedbacks between land use change, fire, and drought in the tropics
• Improving the representation of terrestrial biogeochemistry in climate-carbon models
• High northern latitude climate change and consequences for terrestrial ecosystems
• Using atmospheric observations to better understand the causes of variability in the global carbon cycle, including the role of fire emissions
• Integrating deforestation and fire emissions estimates

Together, remote sensing and atmospheric trace gas observations, models, and field measurements provide a foundation for our work. We use remote sensing observations from a number of satellite missions from NASA, including the Tropical Rain Monitoring Mission (TRMM) and the Earth Observing System (EOS) Aqua, Terra, and Aura satellites. In the future, we will use data from the future replacement to the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) and the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). Atmospheric trace gas observations are available through collaboration with colleagues at UC Irvine, NOAA Climate Monitoring Diagnostics Laboratory (CMDL), and Australia’s Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). We use a suite of modeling approaches to interpret these data, including the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Community Climate System Model, the Carnegie-Ames-Stanford Approach (CASA) biogeochemistry model, and new land use and biogeochemical models under development at UC Irvine. We have an ongoing research program in interior Alaska supported by NASA.