Speaker: Winslow Hansen (Cary Inst. Ecosystem Studies)
Topic: Climate and disturbance impacts on forests: Scaling from tree seedlings to continents

Forests are critical for mitigating climate change. Globally, they sequester a substantial proportion of annual anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and most pathways that limit additional warming to 2 degC rely in some part on forests as natural climate solutions. However, forests face existential threats from extreme drought and disturbance. Predicting how and why forests will respond over the next century is a grand challenge because they are hierarchically organized systems where abrupt change can emerge from aggregate effects of social and biophysical drivers acting on fine-scale processes. How do we uncover the rules that govern interactions and feedbacks among 21st-century forests, disturbance, and climate, from tree seedlings to continents?

The answer may lie in multi-scale investigations that: 1) experimentally identify mechanisms underpinning forest resilience and carbon storage; 2) scale up rich process-based understanding to improve projections of forest futures; and 3) accelerate the predictive science of forest ecology to address society's most pressing environmental challenges. I will discuss our work to determine how and why forests and fire regimes in the western US are changing, the consequences for critical ecosystem services, and our efforts to ensure the best available ecosystem science informs coordinated local efforts that can scale to a national strategy.