Terrestrial Ecosystems

Centers, Projects & Initiatives

 

Researchers

Name Title Fields of interest
Mukund Rao Graduate Student
A. Park Williams Lamont Associate Research Professor, Senior Staff
Kevin Uno Lamont Associate Research Professor My primary research interest is in reconstructing ancient terrestrial ecosystems using light stable isotopes (H, C, N, & O), molecular biomarkers, and other geochemical tools. I also employ these tools to study modern ecosystems in East Africa.
Abdulhakim (Hakim) Abdi Senior Research Staff Assistant Biogeography, Land-use/Land-cover, Remote Sensing, GIS, Species Distribution Modeling
O. Roger Anderson Adjunct Senior Research Scientist Physiological Ecology of Eukaryotic Microbes in aquatic and terrestrial environments
Rosanne D'Arrigo Lamont Research Professor
 

News items

  • Rising Temperatures Load the Dice for Megadrought Risk
    October 05, 2016

    As the American Southwest grows hotter, the risk of severe, long-lasting megadroughts rises, passing 90 percent likelihood by the end of the century if greenhouse gas emissions continue at their current pace, a new study says. If we aggressively reduce greenhouse gas emissions, however, we can cut that risk substantially, the authors write.

  • How Safe is the Hudson? Scientists Test the River, Adirondacks to Ocean
    August 31, 2016

    Lamont's Andy Juhl and a team of scientists working with the non-profit Riverkeeper conducted an unprecedented health check of the entire Hudson River system, starting at the headwaters high in the Adirondacks and going all the way to New York Harbor, where the river meets the ocean. They released their results today, giving the 315-mile-long Hudson River a spotty but mostly positive health report with some important insights.

  • New Support for Human Evolution in Grasslands
    June 06, 2016

    Buried deep in seabed sediments off east Africa, scientists have uncovered a 24-million-year record of vegetation trends in the region where humans evolved. The authors say the record lends weight to the idea that we developed key traits—flexible diets, large brains, complex social structures and the ability to walk and run on two legs—while adapting to the spread of open grasslands. The study appears today in a special human-evolution issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

  • Scientists Say Many Plants Don't Respond to Warming as Thought
    March 21, 2016

    Researchers have predicted that as the planet is warmed by human-produced CO2, plants may add to the emissions and amplify the warming. Now, the most comprehensive global study of its kind yet suggests that this effect has limits, and that increases in plant respiration may not be as big as previously estimated. It shows that rates of increase slow in an easily predictable way as temperatures mount, in every region of earth, from tropics to tundra.

  • How Will Shifting Climate Change U.S. Forests?
    March 15, 2016
    One foggy spring morning just after a hard rain, Park Williams was tromping through the woods deep in Arkansas’ Ozark Mountains. Toiling down a steep slope, he supposedly was keeping a simultaneous eye out for rattlesnakes, copperheads, poison ivy and big old trees. Williams seemed mostly focused on the trees, though; attention to the other stuff was just slowing him down. Williams studies how forests react to changes in climate, and the Ozarks’ deeply dissected hills and hollers are a kind of ground zero for this.
  • Syria’s Drought Likely Its Most Severe in More than 900 Years
    March 01, 2016

    In the years before the Syrian conflict erupted, the region’s worst drought on record set in across the Levant, destroying crops and restricting water supplies in the already water-stressed region. A new study shows that that drought, from 1998-2012, wasn’t just the most severe in a century of record-keeping—it was the Levant’s most severe drought in at least 500 years and likely more than 900 years.

  • A New Global Team Tracks Temperature Change Through Time
    January 28, 2016

    In an effort led by current and former Lamont Tree Ring Lab scientists, the N-TREND consortium (Northern Tree-Ring Network Development) was created to develop a global database of tree-ring research that improves on efforts for developing large-scale temperature reconstructions across the Northern Hemisphere.

  • New Drought Atlas Maps 2,000 Years of Climate in Europe
    November 06, 2015

    The long history of severe droughts across Europe and the Mediterranean has largely been told through historical documents and ancient journals, each chronicling the impact in a geographically restricted area. Now, for the first time, an atlas based on scientific evidence provides the big picture, using tree rings to map the reach and severity of dry and wet periods across Europe and parts of North Africa and the Middle East year-by-year over the past 2,000 years.

  • Ancient Pollen Points to Mega-Droughts in California Thousands of Years Ago
    September 22, 2015

    Ancient pollen grains that were floating in the air when mammoths roamed Southern California are providing new insights into historic droughts in the region, including how a series of mega-droughts between about 27,500 and 25,500 years ago changed the ecological landscape. A new scientific paper tracks these changes and suggests that warm ocean conditions similar to what we see off Southern California today fueled that 2,000-year stretch of droughts.

  • Translating Nature’s Historians: The Tree Ring Lab Turns 40
    September 16, 2015

    Over 40 years, the scientists of the internationally renowned Lamont Tree Ring Lab have hiked the continents in search of tree-ring records. They have documented droughts that stretched for hundreds of years, dated historic earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and found in trees around the world evidence of how the planet cooled and then started warming. The Lab has expanded dendrochronology’s capabilities and becme a global leader in research, training and technology.
     

  • Seeing the Amazon’s Future Through the Fog
    September 01, 2015

    The Amazon Rainforest sprawls across more than 2 million square miles of South America, taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen as “the lungs of the planet.” When they’re healthy, the world’s tropical forests and vegetation absorb up to 30 percent of the CO2 produced by human activities, but during droughts, that capacity falls off. To understand what that will mean as global warming produces more intense and frequent droughts, we need to understand the water and carbon cycles of the Amazon and how those cycles interact.

  • Warming Climate is Deepening California Drought
    August 20, 2015

    A new study says that global warming has measurably worsened the ongoing California drought. While scientists largely agree that natural weather variations have caused a lack of rain, an emerging consensus says that rising temperatures may be making things worse by driving moisture from plants and soil into the air. The new study is the first to estimate how much worse: as much as a quarter. The findings suggest that within a few decades, continually increasing temperatures and resulting moisture losses will push California into even more persistent aridity. The study appears this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

  • Tundra, Microbes and World Climate
    January 26, 2010

    O. Roger Anderson is a microbiologist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who studies bacteria, amoebas, fungi and other microorganisms. Lately he has been thinking about how tiny organisms that inhabit the vast northern tundra regions could contribute to changing climate, since, like humans, they breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.

  • Volcanoes Cool the Tropics, Say Researchers
    January 06, 2009

    But Global Warming May Have Helped Override Some Recent Eruptions

    Climate researchers have shown that big volcanic eruptions over the past 450 years have temporarily cooled weather in the tropics—but suggest that such effects may have been masked in the 20th century by rising global temperatures

 

Videos

Climate and Culture Research at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory
New York's Piermont Marsh A 7,000-year Archive of Climate Change, Human Impact and Uncovered Mysteries
Tree Rings, Climate Change and the Rainy Season
Climate is Changing Our Forests and Plants New Evidence from Alaska and Our Own Backyard
African Climate Changes and Human Evolution Public Lecture, 2004
 

 

Subscribe to Terrestrial Ecosystems