About this event
The future of Earth’s forests in the 21st century hangs in the balance between the potential benefits of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and the stresses and risks from climate change. Gaining a better mechanistic understanding of how climate change will affect forests around the world and how science can inform nature-based climate solutions in forests.
Alan T. Waterman Awardee William Anderegg, Ph.D., director of the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy and associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Utah, and his collaborators focus on understanding and predicting the future of Earth’s forests using a mix of experiments, field measurements, and mechanistic models. Working across a broad array of spatial scales from cells to ecosystems, they study how drought and climate change affect forest ecosystems, including tree physiology, species interactions, carbon cycling, and biosphere-atmosphere feedbacks.
On September 14, 2023, from 1:00pm to 2:00pm Eastern, Dr. Anderegg discussed his team's work and how it resulted in new knowledge about the connection between tree physiology and risk of drought mortality in aspen forests and a new framework for mitigating climate change in forests and an unprecedented and comprehensive risk analysis, including from fire and insects, for Earth’s forests in the next century.