NASA ECOSTRESS Project
We were recently funded on a NASA ECOSTRESS grant to better understand thresholds for plant water use and water use efficiency (WUE) across tropical transition zones .
Read more about the proposal here.
We are currently looking for a funded PhD student to work on this project. Please contact chris.doughty@nau.edu, goldsmith@chapman.edu or joshua.b.fisher@jpl.nasa.gov if interested.
We will also research the implications of changing leaf traits, like albedo, on ecosystem function and global climate which are currently unresolved.
ECOSTRESS identified the highest uncertainty regions in WUE across climate models and targets these ‘hotspots’ for measuring WUE, specifically in tropical/dry transition forests. We will compare ECOSTRESS data to field data from regions in Ghana and Brazil (shown in pictures).