Understanding Spatiotemporal Relationships Between Plant Production and Water Balance Across Dominant Communities and Deserts of the Southwestern U.S.
Speaker: Dr. Erin Bunting
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences, at Michigan State University
Director of Remote Sensing and GIS Research and Outreach Services (RS&GIS)
Thursday, November 2, 2017
3:00-3:50 PM (Period 8)
Turlington Hall Room 3012
University of Florida
All are welcome to attend.
Climate variability and change acting at broad scales can lead to divergent changes in plant production at local scales due to plant, physical, and biogeochemical characteristics. To improve our spatiotemporal understanding of heterogeneity in plant production responses to climate a multi-scale, a multi-tiered methodological approach is used based on time series of Landsat imagery from 1988-2014. This work was conducted across the major deserts of the southwestern U.S. including the Mojave, Sonoran, Great Basin, Chihuahuan, and Colorado Plateau. Such systems have divergent sensitivities to climate and therefore require complex methods (e.g. Critical Climate Periods, Pivot Points, Ground Based Experiments) for management and potential climate change mitigation.
During her PhD work at UF, Erin focused on time series remote sensing and climate-environmental modeling across southern Africa. She then worked for 2.5 years with the USGS at the Southwest Biological Science Center studying critical climate thresholds of key vegetation cover in the major deserts of the U.S. In 2017, Dr Bunting became Director of Remote Sensing and GIS Research and Outreach Services (RS&GIS) and Assistant Professor with the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences, at Michigan State University.