Plant Optics Lab @ UC Davis

Franics Ulep, second year PhD student in Ecology, won an Outstanding Student Presentation Award from the Biogeosciences section at the annual American Geophysical Union this year for his poster "Disentangling Plant Structure Complexities and Sun-Sensor Geometry Induced Changes in Tower-based Remote Sensing Signals". Great work Francis!

https://www.agu.org/honors/ospa/past-recipients 

Evergreen needleleaf forests (ENFs) play a sizable role in the global carbon cycle, but the biological and physical controls on ENF carbon cycle feedback loops are poorly understood and difficult to measure. To address this challenge, a growing appreciation for the stress physiology of photosynthesis has inspired emerging techniques designed to detect ENF photosynthetic activity with optical signals. This Overview summarizes how fundamental plant biological and biophysical processes control the fate of photons from leaf to globe, ultimately enabling remote estimates of ENF photosynthesis.

Francis, Lily, Erica, Chris, Mili, Mukund, Jenny and Troy all attended the annual American Geophysical Union Conference in San Fransisco last week.

Lily Klinek won an award for Outstanding Forest Ecophysiology talk! Sponsored by Licor Biosciences. Congrats Lily on an amazing talk about redwood photosynthesis from the needle to the satellite!

Check out photos here! https://magneylab.ucdavis.edu/photo-galleries/agu-2023 

New lab paper by Logan (former M.S. student) was awarded Editor's Choice at AoBP Plants!

Paper abstract:

The Maloof, Magney, and Gremer labs, and science educator Jamison-McClung at UC Davis are recruiting a postdoctoral scholar for research and training as part of a collabo

This work started as Lily's undergrad thesis at Berkeley and uses longer time series to test the model across a broader range of functional groups, climates, and biomes.

The main take-aways are:

• Soil and air temperature can be used to predict start of growing season.
• Highest model concordance found in temperate mid-latitude deciduous forests.
• Altered dynamics exhibited in high latitude sites and extreme climate sites.

Paper abstract:

How long can trees tolerate drought before the forest dies?

by  Trina Kleist, August 10, 2023

Researchers from UC Davis can now predict which forests could survive despite future drought. Their new method links precipitation to tree growth, and it can help people decide where to put their resources as climate change affects patterns of snow and rainfall that impact the health of forests.

On July 12-15, 40 scientists gathered at the Mountain Research Station near Nederland, CO for the FLUXNET-Coop sponsored “Linking Optical and Energy Fluxes Workshop.” A wide range of disciplines, geographies and career stages were represented, with about ¾ of attendees identifying as early-career. With 11 of the attendees coming from outside of the United States, we sought to build an international community of people working on bridging the gap between flux and remote sensing science.

Article from Springer-Nature Blogs, written by postdoc Mukund Rao:

https://earthenvironmentcommunity.nature.com/posts/the-eurasian-boreal-forest-may-not-be-ready-for-future-heat-waves 

How can we measure forests' photosynthesis?