Biosphere-Atmosphere Interactions
I am most interested in the part of the atmosphere in which we live—right at Earth's surface. The exchanges of energy, carbon, and water are important for the welfare of ecosystems, yet their complexities make them difficult to quantify, and even more difficult to predict how they might change in the future.
Members of the Twine Lab are currently working on the following three topics:
Climate Change and Ecosystems
Future effects of climate change on ecosystem goods and services in the Midwest will be dominated by the response of soybean, maize and wheat agriculture. We are working to reduce scientific uncertainty about how projected climate change will affect the functioning of agroecosystems in terms of regional energy, water, and carbon budgets. Because agroecosystems cover nearly 40% of the global land surface, results will have direct relevance to national and global environmental issues.
Effects of Land Cover Change to Biofuel Production
A key issue in the emerging biofuel industry is whether crops managed for biofuel production can be managed in an ecologically and economically sustainable way. Although there are various test plots of biofuel crops, it is difficult to estimate their potential effect on continental-scale energy, water, and carbon budgets without the use of numerical models. We are conducting a modeling study to simulate the effect of large-scale biofuel crop production on regional energy, water, and carbon budgets in the central U.S. and Brazil. Our goal is to identify possible distributions of land cover (natural vegetation / traditional crops / biofuel crops) that might maximize yield with minimal negative impacts to water quantity and quality, and greenhouse gas emissions.
Dynamic Global Vegetation Modeling of Natural and Managed Ecosystems
Because future effects of climate change on ecosystem goods and services in the Midwest (and other parts of the globe) will be dominated by the response of soybean, maize and wheat agriculture, agroecosystems must be represented in biosphere models that can be incorporated into a global climate model framework, and these models must be validated with global datasets of environmental variables. Traditionally, these models were evaluated with spatially and temporally sparse ground measurements, but satellite observations now allow evaluation at the scale of model grid cells with near-global coverage. We have been evaluating the Agro-IBIS model with datasets of vegetation greenness from the AVHRR and MODIS satellite sensors. With these comparisons, we are testing the model's ability to capture the length of the growing season and peak leaf area index of both natural and managed ecosystems across the central and eastern U.S.
