'Regional tropical' by Dr. Emanuel Gloor
Dr. Emanuel Gloor's short biography:
Dr. Emanuel Gloor works/teaches at University of Leeds, England and is studying the global carbon cycle and cycles related to it and its changes in a warming world. His work is at the interface between observations and modelling. Thus he has been trying to help establish observation programs in land regions where we expect most changes in the future - Siberia and the Tropics and there particularly the Amazon basin.
The Amazon work is jointly with several groups including primarily Luciana Gatti at INPE Brazil who leads an Amazon greenhouse gas sampling program, Ben and Bia Marimon who have established a forest monitoring program at the border between the Amazon forest and Cerrado, and most recently Rafael Oliveiras a plant eco-physiologist with whom Dr. Gloor and his colleague David Galbraith study in situ forest response to heat and drought.
The atmospheric modelling work is in collaboration with Martyn Chipperfield at University of Leeds and attempts to interpret what atmospheric concentration data tell us about large-scale changes primarily of the carbon cycle. For this purpose they use the TOMCAT atmospheric chemistry and transport model developed and maintained by Martyn Chipperfield.
Finally jointly with Roel Brienen they investigate the use of tree rings in tropical forests as a tool to give insights about forest responses to changing atmospheric composition and climate.
Dr. Emanuel Gloor's personal homepage.
Lecture's abstract - 'Regional tropical':
Dr. Emanuel Gloor will first review what hard constraints we have about large-scale changes of land vegetation cover and functioning over the past decades. He will zoom from the largest scales towards smaller scales.
A special emphasis will be on the tropics. Atmospheric concentration data reveal several important patterns like changes of the magnitude of the seasonal amplitude as well as an increase in the land carbon sink over time. Some have tried to argue the opposite but these voices have recently become increasingly less vocal.
Remote sensing data provide also constraints on land vegetation changes and these will be reviewed. These data - although not so easily interpreted in terms of simple physical properties - are largely in agreement with what atmospheric data tell us about land vegetation changes. Yet another constraint on changes of forests like the Amazon is provided by regular and sustained inventories. Method and results will be explained and discussed. For the Amazon the data reveal a substantial although by now weakening carbon sink.
Besides such constraints there are also more controversial recent results - which effectively contradict each other. He will in particular discuss results based on tree ring isotopes about changes in water use efficiency as well as growth and what pitfalls there are in the use of these data.
Depending on time he will also discuss future scientific directions, which he finds important and new approaches how to address them.
Recommended background publication on this presentation:
Brienen, R. J. W., Phillips, O. L., Feldpausch, T. R., Gloor, E. et al.: Long-term decline of the Amazon carbon sink. Nature, 519, 344–348, (2015). Doi:10.1038/nature14283.