BEGIN seminar – Dr Thiago Silva
Date: 14 May 2019
Time: 15:00-16:00
Venue: Forbes room, Irvine Building
Title: Embracing variability: using remote sensing and spatial data to understand ecosystem function in seasonal ecosystems
Abstract: Highly seasonal environments are often characterized by a strong coupling between environmental variation and ecosystem responses, including organism adaptations, plant phenology and productivity, and biogeochemical cycling. This tight coupling can help us quantify and forecast changes in ecosystem function caused by changes in climatic and environmental factors, as long as we can understand and quantify the responses and uncertainties associated with seasonal variability. In his talk, Dr. Thiago Silva will show some examples of his previous and current work using direct and indirect remote sensing methods and spatial variables to capture, quantify and forecast the effects of environmental variation on vegetation dynamics, ecosystem function and biogeochemical cycling, from local to regional scales, focusing on Brazilian ecosystems.
Bio:
Dr. Thiago Silva has recently joined University of Stiling after being an assistant professor for 5 years at São Paulo State University (UNESP, Brazil). He started his career as an ecosystem ecologist with a strong focus on remote sensing of Amazon floodplain wetlands. Since then, his research has expanded to encompass several aspects of global change biology, including plant community ecology, plant functional ecology and biogeography/macroecology. He is particularly interested in environmental regulation of community assembly and ecosystem function, and on developing quantitative approaches that explicitly incorporate the spatial and temporal dynamics of the biosphere at multiple scales. His research often combines in-situ ecological methods with modern remote sensing, GIS and data science, leading to collaborations with landscape, community and ecosystem ecologists, phylogeographers, and applied ecologists, as well as climatologists, hydrologists, geologists and computer scientists.
