May 01, 2008 at 12:00pm
Atul Jain, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Joint Global Change Research Institute
8400 Baltimore Avenue, Suite 201
College Park, MD 20740-2496
Improved understanding of terrestrial carbon dynamics is taking on increased scientific and political importance following the UN climate conference in Kyoto, which encourages countries to actively manage the terrestrial biosphere as a complementary measure of emission reduction. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain present trends in the terrestrial uptake of CO2. These mechanisms include physiological responses of terrestrial ecosystems to increasing ambient CO2 concentrations, anthropogenic N deposition, and variations in productivity due to climate variability. Each of these mechanisms may be playing a significant role in the global CO2 budget. In addition, the terrestrial biosphere is also influenced by non-anthropogenic disturbances such as lightning-induced forest fires in addition to anthropogenic disturbances, which include clearing of land for agriculture, conversion of forest to pasture, and harvest of forest products. This talk will present the concurrent effects of all important ecosystem processes and disturbances in addition to impact on historical net terrestrial CO2 uptake as estimated using an Integrated Science Assessment Model (ISAM), a geographically explicit advanced terrestrial ecosystem model.
Atul Jain is an Associate Professor at the University of Ilinois@Urbana-Champaign. Before joining the University of Illinois in 1995, he held research positions at the University of Muenster, Germany from 1988-1992, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA from 1993-1994. He earned his Ph. D. in Atmospheric Sciences from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New Delhi, India. His research focuses on understanding how interactions among the climate system and human activities alter the cycles of carbon, a major greenhouse gas (GHG), and to provide useful projections of future changes in global carbon and resultant future climate change. Dr. Jain has served as a lead and contributing authors for major assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
