How much carbon a forest ecosystem can sequester is determined by both postdisturbance regrowth and environmentally modified growth. Disturbance causes sharp declines in the short term and is followed by regrowth in the long term. Environmental change may alter carbon accumulation through increasing CO2, nitrogen deposition and climate change. Regrowth and modified growth occur simultaneously, yet they are usually studied separately and assessed using an additive approach. Alternatively, an interactive approach using hierarchical models can address their concurrent nature and evaluate their joint effects. Hierarchical models are informed by forest age data, which have recently become available at global scales. The age-based hierarchical framework provides a coherent and feasible way to integrate regrowth and modified growth in understanding forest dynamics.

Biography

Kai is interested in global change ecology, ecological modeling, and environmental data science, where he enjoys integrating ecological theory with advanced tools in statistics and computer science. His current research focuses on plant and soil responses to environmental change in the coupled natural and human systems, spanning from meter-scale experiments to global-scale analyses. Recent projects include quantifying climate change impacts on forest geographic distribution and growth in North America; synthesizing a multi-factor global change experiment in California grassland; understanding soil fungi and tree mutualisms across geographical gradients in the United States; detecting land surface phenology change in Northern Hemisphere.

Kai is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award , an elected Ecological Society of America Early Career Fellow , and a winner of the New Phytologist Tansley Medal . Kai completed his postdoc with Chris Field and Tad Fukami at Stanford University and received his PhD in ecology with Jim Clark and MS in statistics with Alan Gelfand from Duke University.