PhD Studentship - How Much Carbon Will Forests Take Up in the Future?

Climate change has been happening at an unprecedented rate due to human activities such as fossil fuel burning and land-use change. Increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere traps more heat and increases global temperature. The changing climate causes more frequent and more intense extreme weather events such as drought and heat waves, adversely affecting Earth’s natural ecosystems and human societies. The good news is that there is a scientific consensus that land surface may be able to mitigate global warming by removing around 30% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions mainly through enhanced photosynthesis. However, the capacity for enhanced terrestrial carbon uptake to continue into the future is highly uncertain when predicted using current terrestrial biosphere models.

This PhD project will help us better understand current and future ecosystem dynamics under these changing climate conditions. It will collaborate closely with the Free-air CO2 enrichment (FACE) experiment at the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research (BIFoR), which is an ecosystem-scale experiment mimicking challenges that a mature temperate forest will face under future elevated CO2. Using these measurements will help provide more reliable predictions of ecosystem energy, water, and carbon dynamics. This project will provide an important guide on the future of temperate forests in the UK, and whether they will continue to sequester carbon in the coming century under different scenarios, especially those taking into account UK’s extensive afforestation ambitions.

The goal of the project is twofold. (1) The research will enhance our understanding on carbon-water cycling of temperate forests and evaluate the potential of temperate forests to mitigate climate change in the future. (2) The project will help establish a novel data-model integration framework that can also be applied globally, and help refine predictions for future terrestrial carbon uptake that can be used by government policy makers.

We are looking for a talented, highly motivated and dedicated candidate with a strong degree performance in a subject relevant to the research project, e.g., Environmental Sciences, Earth Sciences, Ecology, Physical Geography, Environmental Engineering, or other quantitative disciplines. An MSc degree in a relevant area is desirable but not essential. We are flexible in the previous experience and knowledge of potential candidates in the subject area, please contact the supervisor to discuss this and how it may translate to this project. A minimum English language level of IELTS score of 6.5 (or equivalent) with no element below 6.0 is required.

The project will be supervised by Liling Chang (lilingchang@fas.harvard.edu) and Joshua Larsen (j.larsen@bham.ac.uk).

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