Latest News

Synthesis paper on evergreen forest photosynthesis published in BioScience

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.

8 Lab members present at AGU and Lily wins an award!

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 led by Lily as part of the AmeriFlux special issue!

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:

Linking Optical and Energy Fluxes workshop is a wrap!

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.

Logan finishes thesis and lands job at Biologica!

We are so proud of Logan Brissette for finishing her Master's of Science in Ecology this spring! Her thesis was entitled 'Advances in remote sensing techniques for monitoring and predicting plant physiology and biochemistry.' Her work included developing a nighttime LED system for monitoring changes in canopy fluorescence and developing spectral techniques to track changes in needle pigments from field work conducted at the Ordway-Swischer Biological Station near Gainesville, Florida. She has been a great asset to the lab, and we will miss her!

Lily awarded NSF Graduate Research Fellowship!

Huge congrats to Lily Klinek, PhD student in the Graduate Group in Ecology who won the highly competitive NSF GRFP for her proposal on understanding the carbon cycling in the redwood forests of California.

Her proposed project will seek to define and constrain the relationship between true photosynthetic rates of the redwoods, satellite representations of these rates, and the climatic and environmental drivers that influence them. From this, she will predict how carbon storage, allocation and sequestration in redwoods will change in future climate scenarios.