Speaker: Dr. Xiangtao Xu, Cornell University
The resilience of tropical forests under changing climate and disturbance regimes is a critical uncertainty of predicting the future fates of terrestrial biosphere. This uncertainty arises from a lack of (interpretable) observations and constraints on tropical forest growth and mortality that fundamentally drive tropical carbon cycles. This talk will present novel results on key environmental sensitivities of tropical tree growth and mortality estimated from a combination of remote sensing, tree ring, and terrestrial biosphere modeling.