Authors.
Alejandro Salazar
Postdoc
Faculty of Life and Env. Sciences
University of Iceland
Reykjavík, Iceland
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I do research in soil biogeochemistry, environmental microbiology and global change.
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In my postdoc, I am investigating the influences of warming on soil microbial communities and the ecosystem services they provide (primarily related to N cycling).
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More about my work here.
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Jeffrey S. Dukes
Professor
Director of the Purdue Climate Change Research Center (PCCRC)
Purdue University
Indiana, USA
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In our lab we conduct ecological research, often addressing current environmental challenges. We are interested in interactions among plant communities, ecosystem processes, and global environmental change. Much of our work focuses on the drivers and effects of species composition change. We often use invasive species to study how community and ecosystem properties influence one another.
Juan F. Salazar
Assistant Professor
School of Environment
Universidad de Antioquia
Medellín, Colombia
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My research focuses on the hydrological and meteorological role of forests. My research group and I are conducting research on the potential impacts of forest loss on water availability at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Our ongoing studies suggest that forests play a key role in maintaining continental precipitation, as well as in regulating water availability in river basins. We use the Amazon river basin as our main natural laboratory for exploring these issues.
Daniel
Ruiz-Carrascal
Associate Professor
Department of Environmental Engineering
Antioquia School of Engineering Medellín, Colombia
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Daniel Ruiz-Carrascal is an adjunct researcher at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, Columbia University in the City of New York (USA) and an associate professor at the Department of Environmental Engineering, Antioquia School of Engineering (Colombia). His areas of expertise include hydrology, climatology, water resources, and environmental health sciences. His research interests focus on environmental change, climate variability and change in high-mountain watersheds, and climate variability/change and human health impacts. For more information please visit this site
Ángela Rendón
Assistant Professor
School of Environment
Universidad de Antioquia,
Medellín, Colombia
My research focuses on the potential impacts of global change on the atmospheric environment of urban and/or mountain regions. I am currently involved in research on the meteorological role of forests, as well as on the effects of land use/cover change on precipitation over tropical South America.
Qianlai Zhuang
Professor
Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Purdue University
Indiana, USA
My research focuses on the interactions among atmosphere, biosphere, and human dimension in the context of climate change, chemical element cycles, and policy-making. One of my major research activities is on carbon exchanges between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere by investigating how changes of climate, soil physics (e.g., permafrost dynamics, change of soil moisture), atmospheric chemicals (e.g., CO2 and O3), land-use and land-cover (e.g., fire disturbances), affect the carbon assimilation and decomposition with both process-based and inversion modeling approaches. My second major research activity is on modeling CH4 exchanges between the atmosphere and terrestrial ecosystems. My third major research activity is on analyzing consequences of air pollutants for ecosystem services and the economy.
Kenneth Feeley
Associate Professor
International Center for Tropical Botany (ICTB) and Department of Biological Sciences
Florida International University
Miami USA
My research focuses on understanding and predicting the potential impacts of global climate change on tropical forests and their constituent tree species. Current projects are investigating how rising temperatures may be driving changes in the geographic distributions of Andean tree species.
Juan D. Restrepo
Professor
Dept. Ciencias de la Tierra
Universidad Eafit,
Medellín, Colombia
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Professor Restrepo´s research focuses on environmental oceanography of deltas, estuaries, and coastal lagoons waters, with focus on the factors controlling water discharge, sediment load, and dissolved load to the ocean from the Pacific and Caribbean rivers of Colombia. Also, his work focuses on improving the understanding of the natural and anthropogenic causes affecting denudation rates and sediment transport to the Caribbean Sea from the largest fluvial system of Colombia, the Magdalena River. He has been head of the Magdalena River Science Initiative in Colombia during the last decade. Currently, Professor Restrepo is a visiting scientist and professor at University of Colorado Boulder and at the Department of Geography and the Environment at UT Austin. In 2014, professor Restrepo was awarded as a member of the Colombian Academy of Sciences.
Paola A. Arias
Assistant Professor
Escuela Ambiental, Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de Antioquia
Medellín, Colombia
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My research interest focuses on climate variability and change over the Americas at multiple space-time scales. My current projects aim to identify how climate in South America has changed during the last millennium and the historical record period, as well as its projections under future climate scenarios. A particular interest on my research is how the South American monsoon system and Amazon wet season have changed during the last decades and its relationship not only with large-scale phenomena, but also with local changes associated to vegetation.
Carlos Sierra
Research group leader
Max planck Institute for Biogeochemistry
Jena, Germany
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My research focuses on understanding interactions between the environment and multiple biogeochemical cycles. I use mathematical tools, ecosystem models, and measurements to improve our predictions about the responses and feedbacks between climate and terrestrial ecosystems. I am particularly interested in tropical forests and their interactions with the climate system.
Lina Mercado
Senior Lecturer in Physical Geography
College of Live and Environmental Sciences
University of Exeter
Exeter, UK
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I am a plant physiologist and vegetation modeller and my work has focus on improving representation of plant physiological processes within earth system models in order to improve predictions of present and future land surface -climate interactions. I have been working with the JULES land surface model of the UK met Office global climate model for the last ten years. Areas of work include, photosynthesis, radiation interception, nutrient constraints on plant productivity, plant responses to temperature both globally but also regionally. Current regional work has focus on Amazon and UK ecosystems.
Juan Camilo
Villegas-Palacio
Associate Professor
Escuela Ambiental - Facultad de Ingeniería
Universidad de Antioquia
Medellín, Colombia
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Juan Camilo Villegas is an Associate Professor in the School of Environment, Universidad de Antioquia (Medellín, Colombia). His work addresses the effects of vegetation change (including land use change) on ecohydrological processes in tropical, as well as temperate, ecosystems. His work includes multiple spatial and temporal scales, from plot to subcontinental scales and their link to ecosystem regulation services. His current work addresses the effects of land use change in tropical Mountain ecosystems in the central Andes of Colombia and how these chances can affect wáter and soil dynamics in these highly strategic systems. He is also working on understanding the effets of large scale ecosystem effects on climate via atmospheric transport of moisture and ecoclimatic teleconnections, with a focus on the Amazon forest as a key regulator of South American ecohydrological dynamics.
Juan Carlos Pérez
Associate Professor
Escuela de Geociencias, Facultad de Ciencias
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Medellín, Colombia
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Our group is developing tools for research in soil and plant sciences. By using classical and contemporary approaches, we are crafting new tools for the non-invasive assessment of soil chemical and microbiological properties. We are also testing plant self-similar growth, and its usefulness in predictive growth modeling. These two lines of work are pushing us to boldly search for drivers of soil microbial and plant adaptation, and its consequences to ecosystem functioning
Germán Poveda
Professor
Departamento de Geociencias y Medio Ambiente
Facultad de Minas
Universidad Nacional de Colombia
Medellín, Colombia
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Germán Poveda is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 1998, and of scientific steering committees of a variety of research programs, such as: the Global Energy and Water Cycle Exchanges Project (GEWEX), the Large Scale Biosphere-Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA), the
Global Environmental Change and Human Health (GECHH) project, the Intra-Americas Study of Climate Processes (IASCLIP) program, and the International Council for Science-Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean (ICSU-ROLAC). Poveda's research focuses on coupling between hydrological, ecological and climatological processes; water and energy balances; and climate change and variability.
Adriana Sánchez
Professor
Programa de Biología
Universidad del Rosario
Bogotá, Colombia
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My research interests focus on understanding the potential impact of climate change on Andean montane forest diversity, distribution and ecophysiology. I have been currently working in a project that investigates the microclimatic conditions of an alpine region close to Bogotá and the ecophysiological response of some species to those conditions. With these results we can project how changes in climate may impact those species and the ecosystem as a whole.
Stephen Sitch
Professor
University of Exeter
Department of Geography
Exeter, UK
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Professor Sitch has 20 years research experience in Earth System Science. The central theme of his research is the role of land biosphere in the Earth System. His research is highly interdisciplinary in nature, ranging from plant physiology, plant population dynamics, to regional and global biogeochemical cycling. He was principal developer of the LPJ Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM), and has published extensively on modelling plant physiology, vegetation dynamics, biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem-atmosphere interactions and land-use change. He was leader on plant physiology (to 2010) and vegetation dynamics/disturbance (to 2014) for JULES, the UK land-surface model. He leads the international, multi-DGVM (TRENDY) team that provide land flux estimates for the Global C Project’s annual C budget update.
José A.
Posada-Marín
MS. Student
School of Environment
Universidad de Antioquia,
Medellín, Colombia
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My Master's research has focused on the analysis of the effects of ENSO on the ecohydroclimatology of northwest South America and the characterization of land use/cover change in the last years in this region, using information of spatialized variables (reconstructions, reanalysis, satellite data, etc.). In addition, I have investigated the representation made by some general circulation models (IFS y CCSM4) of the hydroclimatological effects of ENSO on the tropical Andes of South America. I am currently evaluating the skill of the regional circulation model WRF to represent hydroclimatological features of this region and the effect that El Niño has on them. Future work of our research group seeks evidence from regional climate modeling of the role of the forest regulating the effects of El Niño on the hydroclimatology of the tropical Andes.
Maria del Rosario Uribe
PhD Student
Ecological Sciences and Engineering/ Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Purdue University
Indiana, USA
I am interested in the use of biogeochemical and ecosystem models to study and predict carbon feedbacks between tropical ecosystems and the atmosphere. My current research is focused on improving model simulations of the carbon uptake seasonality in tropical evergreen forests of the central Amazon using the Terrestrial Ecosystem Model (TEM). I am also interested in the role of secondary forests of the tropics in the global carbon budget.
Also authors:
Guillermo Murray Tortarolo, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Daniel Mercado-Bettin, Grupo GIGA, Escuela Ambiental, Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia
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