CREAF

TITLE: "Representativeness of environmental observatory networks: a reality or an intangible goal"

DATE: Friday 13th May 2022.

TIME & FORMAT: form 12 to 1pm CET - Onsite and online. Seminars will combine online and onsite formats (CREAF, Sala Graus II, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain) but in all cases, talks will be always streamed (not recorded), so they can be followed online. 

HOW TO CONNECT: Direct link to Rodrigo Vargas's conference.

SUMMARY OF THE WORKSHOP:

Environmental observatory networks (EONs) promote collection and dissemination of environmental data along with efforts towards standardization of protocols, data sharing and synthesis activities. Arguably, EONs are the proper structure to address complex, global and socially imperative issues, and value-added products from EONs have been useful for the scientific community and policy makers to assess knowledge gaps and expand the frontiers of ecological understanding. Unfortunately, we cannot measure everywhere within a region or around the world, so the spatial distribution of nodes (i.e., study sites) within EONs is limited or biased. This challenge opens the need to evaluate the representativeness of EONs to better interpret their value-added products and syntheses of information. This seminar will discuss evaluation of representativeness of EONs that contribute with information of land-atmosphere water and carbon fluxes across the Americas and the world.   

Rodrigo Vargas is a Professor in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences at the University of Delaware. He completed his PhD at the University of California-Riverside and a postdoc at the University of California-Berkeley. His research interests focus on how biophysical factors regulate greenhouse gas dynamics in terrestrial and coastal ecosystems. He studies soil-plant-atmosphere interactions to understand and quantify the response of ecosystems to management, extreme events, and global environmental change. His research spans from data mining and applying machine learning approaches, to remote sensing and micrometeorological measurements of greenhouse gas fluxes, and modeling of carbon dynamics at multiple spatial and temporal scales. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed publications, has participated in developing decision support systems and policy-relevant applications, and is a Highly Cited Researcher by the Web of Science. He is a member of the editorial boards of Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences, Oecologia, and Global Change Biology. Finally, he is a member of the cluster on Science and the Arts in the Earth and Environmental Science of the Franklin Institute, a member of the U.S. National Committee for Soil Science of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and a fellow of the Earth Leadership Program.