Distinguished Lecturer Series: Dr. Lina Mercado
Dr. Lina Mercado will be at U of T Mississauga on December 8 to deliver her talk, “Impacts of thermal acclimation of photosynthesis and aerosols on land carbon storage.”
Dr. Mercado’s research focuses on the use of plant ecophysiological data to improve process understanding, and to develop and validate dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs). She works at multiple scales, from ecosystem to a global level. Dr. Mercado’s presentation will cover recent model development on i) the effects of thermal acclimation of photosynthesis on the global land carbon sink, and ii) increasing carbon uptake across the Amazon forest due to plant physiological responses to increased diffuse radiation from fire emissions. Additionally she will present a recent modelling study that estimates the impact of accounting for thermal acclimation of photosynthetic traits on the future land carbon sink using 22 climate models and a DGVM.
Thermal acclimation makes tropical and temperate carbon less vulnerable to warming and reduces the warming-induced carbon uptake in the boreal region. The outcome of this study highlights the urgent need for more studies on thermal acclimation of photosynthesis, specifically in the tropical regions where there is a lack of data, and ecosystem scale warming and elevated CO2 experiments.
A second study for which Dr. Mercado will present her findings looking at the impacts of aerosols via changes in diffuse radiation on land carbon sink, due to biomass burning aerosols over the Amazon region.
The presentation by Dr. Mercado takes place on December 8 at 3:30 in CCIT-2150. Everyone is welcome.