Introduction to the Lecture

The resilience of tropical forests under changing climate and disturbance regimes is a critical uncertainty of predicting the future fates of terrestrial biosphere. This uncertainty arises from a lack of (interpretable) observations and constraints on tropical forest growth and mortality that fundamentally drive tropical carbon cycles. In this talk, I will present novel results on key environmental sensitivities of tropical tree growth and mortality estimated from a combination of remote sensing, tree ring, and terrestrial biosphere modeling.

Profile of the Speaker

Xiangtao Xu is an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University. He leads the Biosphere Modeling and Monitoring (BioM2) lab (https://xiangtaoxu.eeb.cornell.edu/), which aims at developing a predictive understanding of global forest dynamics by integrating ground observations, remote sensing, and trait-based computational modeling. He has published 30+ papers on top ecology journals including PNAS, New Phytologist, Ecology Letters, Global Change Biology, etc. with funding from US Department of Energy, NSF, and USDA.