NRES Departmental Seminar by Dr. Jonathan Greenberg, University of Illinois, Department of Geography.

Title: Quantifying Environmental Limitations on Vegetation using Geospatial Data

Understanding climate change impacts on ecosystems requires recognition of the principle of limiting factors: that survival, growth and reproduction of organisms are limited by a single limiting factor at a given time. The identification and quantification of limiting factors, due to significant sample size requirements, is uniquely suited to a fused geospatial solution: remotely sensed grids of vegetation response data (e.g. tree cover) can be linked with continuous surfaces of climate variables (e.g. temperature, precipitation, radiation) to produce a dataset in which each grid cell becomes a sample, and the entire landscape becomes data for the analysis. I will present two case studies illustrating this approach at a local scale (the Lake Tahoe Basin, NV/CA) and at a global scale asking the question of which climate variables limit tree cover, and how these limitations inform our understanding of ecosystem responses to a changing climate.

Dr. Greenberg is hosted by Dr. Jen Fraterrigo

Jonathan A. Greenberg received a B.A. in Biology (with distinction) from Boston University in 1996, and a PhD. in Ecology from the University of California, Davis in 2004. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the department of Geography at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research centers on addressing questions of the impacts of climate change and land use/land cover change on vegetated ecosystems using remote sensing data.