Carlos A. Sierra
Research group leader
- Email:
- Carlos A. Sierra
- Post:
- Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Postbox 10 01 64 - 07701 Jena, Germany
- Phone:
- + 49 3641 576133
- Orcid ID:
- 0000-0003-0009-4169
- :
- ResearcherID
- :
- Scholar
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- Blog
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- GitHub
Research interests
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.
I lead an independent research group on Theoretical Ecosystem Ecology funded by the German Science Foundation through the Emmy Noether Program. Our group is focused on producing synthesis of ecosystem models and studying nonlinearities in biogeochemical cycling.
Education
| Degree | Institution | Year | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PhD in Forest Science | Oregon State University | 2006-2009 | ||
| M.Sc. in Forest Science | Oregon State University | 2003-2006 | ||
| B.Sc. in Forestry | Universidad Nacional de Colombia sede Medellín | 1995-2001 |
Teaching
I teach different courses at the International Max Planck School for Global Biogeochemical Cycles and at other institutions:
| Course | Institution | Material | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Terrestrial biosphere | IMPRS-gBGC | Lecture notes | ||
| Ecosystem modeling | IMPRS-gBGC | Lecture notes | ||
| Radiocarbon models | U California Irvine | Lecture notes | ||
| Tropical nutrient cycling | U Freiburg | Lecture notes |
Selected publications
Sierra, C. (2012). Temperature sensitivity of organic matter decomposition in the Arrhenius equation: some theoretical considerations. Biogeochemistry, 108(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-011-9596-9
Sierra, C. A., Müller, M., & Trumbore, S. E. (2012). Models of soil organic matter decomposition: the SoilR package, version 1.0. Geosci. Model Dev., 5(4), 1045–1060. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-5-1045-2012
Sierra, C. A., & Müller, M. (2015). A general mathematical framework for representing soil organic matter dynamics. Ecological Monographs, 85, 505–524. https://doi.org/10.1890/15-0361.1
Sierra, C. A., Trumbore, S. E., Davidson, E. A., Vicca, S., & Janssens, I. (2015). Sensitivity of decomposition rates of soil organic matter with respect to simultaneous changes in temperature and moisture. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 7(1), 335–356. https://doi.org/10.1002/2014MS000358
Sierra, C. A., Müller, M., Metzler, H., Manzoni, S., & Trumbore, S. E. (2017). The muddle of ages, turnover, transit, and residence times in the carbon cycle. Global Change Biology, 23(5), 1763–1773. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.13556
Metzler, H., Müller, M., & Sierra, C. A. (2018). Transit-time and age distributions for nonlinear time-dependent compartmental systems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(6), 1150–1155. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1705296115
Sierra, C. A., Ceballos-Núñez, V., Metzler, H., & Müller, M. (2018). Representing and Understanding the Carbon Cycle Using the Theory of Compartmental Dynamical Systems. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 10(8), 1729–1734. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018MS001360