Biologists have widely documented how the
local environment influences plants. Recent findings suggest,
surprisingly, that the reverse is also true: plant
distribution and functioning control the local energy balance
at Earth's surface and directly modify regional and global
scale climate. In this talk I will discuss how plants modify
the climate system and its response to external forcing. We
will investigate the sensitivity of the atmosphere to changes
in plant cover, in particular the location of plant cover
change. We will also explore the role that plant responses to
a changing climate can further modify climate. Taken together,
these findings demonstrate that ecosystems and climate must be
considered together as a coupled system, particularly when
assessing the response of the climate system to change.
About the Speaker:
Abigail Swann is an Associate Professor
jointly appointed in Atmospheric Sciences and Biology at the
University of Washington. She studies both the physical
climate system and the underlying biological processes that
govern ecosystems and characterize their response to
environmental variability and change. She received her
bachelors degree and PhD from the Earth and Planetary Sciences
Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and a
Masters degree from Columbia University.