Environmental Science and Engineering Seminar

The history of plant physiology has long focused on the question: how do plants use water? Estimating how plants use water well is critical to improving local water budgets, fire fuel models, and global atmospheric carbon projections. Decades of proposed models and heuristics are available to address this, ranging from purely physical (plants are straws driven by water potential) to evolutionary (plants are optimally adapted to their environments). This is most challenging to estimate at the global scales—how should we estimate plant water-use when plant strategies, species composition, and environmental conditions are highly dynamic in time and space? In this talk, Dr. Reich will discuss two projects that address this question and highlight what assumptions work, the conditions under which they break, and how the field should look forward. The first project explores when and why popular plant water-use models break using eddy covariance flux tower sites along an aridity gradient in New Mexico. The second project explores what redefining plant strategies at global scales might look like if we use a fusion of remote sensing data, machine learning, and earth system models.