Plants, fires and rainfall

Date
Speaker
Mara Baudena

In this talk, I would like to introduce my research to the institute, as I am still rather new (although already a year has passed since I arrived!).  My research aims to predict how different terrestrial ecosystems actively respond to global environmental change. I focus mostly on plant ecosystems in drylands, savannas and Mediterranean forests. I am interested in studying the complex ecosystem dynamics emerging from plant-plant and plant-environment interactions, including wildfires and vegetation-climate feedbacks.

I will illustrate some works a bit more in detail. With the help of simplified mechanistic models (specifically, pulse stochastic differential equations), we studied how wildfires and climate change may influence Mediterranean forests in the future, including their possible shift to an alternative ecosystem state, namely an open shrubland, which is generally an undesirable state from a human perspective. Furthermore, I will talk about a  study where we evaluated the effect of land-use and deforestation in the Amazon on precipitation, which has likely been underestimated so far.

Replay it on YOUTUBE

Mara Baudena's CV: https://www.isac.cnr.it/en/users/mara-baudena

Venue
Virtual Go To Meeting: https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/932307501