Events Calendar

USC Water Institute Seminar

Speaker: Dr. Christina Tague , Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, UC Santa Barbara

Talk Title: Forest Eco-hydrology in a Changing Climate: Integrating modelling and measurements

Abstract: Forests are a key provider of ecosystems services throughout the globe. Understanding and ultimately predicting how forest are likely to respond to a changing climate is an active area of interest and research. While some model and empirical studies show increased in forest growth, particularly in temperature limited environments, several recent monitoring studies suggest that forest mortality may be increasing in response to greater or more frequent drought stress. Given the importance of water-limitation and drought stress as a control on how forests will respond to a changing climate, models that explicitly link forest productivity with hydrology are essential tools. In this talk I will provide an overview of RHESSys, a coupled model of ecosystem biogeochemical cycling and spatially distributed hydrology. RHESSys is an open-source tool that integrates state-of-the art science based understanding of forest structure and function with observational data from multiple sources, including point measures such as streamflow and carbon flux tower data and spatial data from remote sensing products. I will present a number of case studies including forests in both natural and urban environments where we have used RHESSys to examine forest response to both historic and projected future climate variability and change. These case studies focus
explicitly on eco-hydrologic interactions and demonstrate critical linkages among forest water use, carbon cycling, drought stress mortality, soil moisture and streamflow. I
conclude by summarizing future directions for RHESSys as a tool for investigating the vulnerability of forest health and water resources to changing climate and land management scenarios.

Biography: Dr. Christina Tague (Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at University of California , Santa Barbara). Dr. Tague investigates climate and landuse/land cover change impacts on streamflow regimes and watershed biogeochemical cycling , emphasizing the interactions between hydrology and ecosystem processes. She specializes in the development and application of spatial models. Her work seeks to design models as a flexible, adaptive framework for integrating conceptual understanding with data from a variety of sources, including intensive field-based monitoring and experimentation and remote sensing. Dr. Tague is
one of the principle developers of RHESSys, Regional hydro-ecologic simulation system, a modeling framework that provides science-based information on the spatial patterns of vulnerability in water quantity and quality, and ecosystem health. Current projects include modeling climate change impacts on snowpack and summer streamflow patterns in the mountains of the Western US, and examinin how urbanization alters drainage patterns and associated biogeochemical cycling at part of the Baltimore Long Term Ecological Research Site and in selected Southern California watersheds. Dr. Tague received her Ph.D. from the Department of Geography at the University of Toronto,
Canada and has an undergraduate degree from the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Host: Prof. Gaurav Sukhatme

Location: Seaver Science Library (SSL) - 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kanak Agrawal