Achievement

Ben Sulman used data collected from the University of Michigan Biological Station to test two different landscape based models to understand the sensitivity of forested landscapes to climate change pressures. He found that landscape-scale net carbon exchange responds linearly to continuous changes in potential carbon uptake and inter-annual variability, while responses to stochastic changes are non-linear and became more important at shorter mean disturbance intervals. These results provided insight on how to better parameterize coupled carbon-climate models to more realistically simulate feedbacks between forests and the atmosphere. His results were presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in 2010.