ITMN Seminar #3 - Tree mortality in Australian ecosystems: past, present and future

Описание: Seminar #3 of the International Tree Mortality Network seminar series
www.tree-mortality.net

Tree mortality in Australian ecosystems: past, present and future
Belinda Medlyn

Australia is not only the driest inhabited continent, it also experiences high interannual variability in rainfall, and severe multi-year droughts. Tree death from drought is thus a recurring feature of the Australian landscape. In this talk I will review our current understanding of drought mortality in Australian ecosystems, including the historical context, current field research on the extent and mechanisms of drought dieback and recovery, and the development of models to predict future drought mortality risk.

Bio: Belinda is Distinguished Professor at the University of Western Sydney. Her research focuses on how plants, especially forests, respond to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide and climate change. She works at the interface between experiments and models: her aim is to develop evidence-based models of how ecosystem productivity, water use and species composition will be affected by global change, and to do so she works closely with a number of experimental teams world-wide to test and improve ecosystem models.