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The Harvard Forest and the Harvard University Center for the Environment present the second of two Inaugural Charles Bullard Lectures featuring Susan Trumbore, Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry & Professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine.
The Harvard Forest and the Harvard University Center for the Environment present the second of two Inaugural Charles Bullard Lectures featuring Susan Trumbore, Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry & Professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine.
How long does C remain in ecosystems before it is returned to the atmosphere? The answer is important because it tells us how long we might be able to manage vegetation and soils to store carbon. The major measure we have used for this is the ‘turnover time’, estimated as the inventory of carbon divided by the input or output rates. However, a single number is not sufficient to integrate the complex cascade of processes that return C fixed by photosynthesis to the atmosphere. This talk will discuss how the global isotope tracer of bomb radiocarbon can provide a means to estimate the distribution of ages of C being respired from ecosystems. Dr. Trumbore will use data from the new International Soil Radiocarbon Database to demonstrate how transit time distributions change globally, suggest how we can use this information to test global carbon cycle models, and what we can learn about managing soils to take up carbon.
The annual Charles Bullard Lectures were established by the Harvard Forest in 2022 to honor and learn from renowned scholars of forest ecology and conservation. The Lectures are supported by the Charles Bullard endowment and are closely associated with Harvard’s long-running Bullard Fellowship, a distinguished scholar-in-residence program for forest research.
For information on the first lecture: MAR 30 | "What Is the Future of Amazon Forests?" >>
Contact: huce@environment.harvard.edu