Eco-Meteorology group
Dr. Sung-Ching Lee
Mission
©Sung-Ching Lee Created with BioRender.com
The Eco-Meteorology Group (Eco-Met) aims at improving the understanding of the interactions and feedbacks between climate, environmental changes, nutrient availability and the biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. To this end we combine tools and approaches from biometeorology and biogeochemistry such as eddy covariance flux observation, field manipulation experiments, soil and plant analysis, and proximal/remote sensing techniques. With a global focus, the group investigates the biosphere-atmosphere interactions by contributing to and analyzing globally distributed datasets (e.g. FLUXNET database, remote sensing products) using data-mining and model-data integration techniques. Exploiting this generalized information, our final goal is to enhance the description of the response of biosphere’s element cycling to climate variability in state-of-the-art global terrestrial biosphere models and up-scaling approaches.
Focus Areas
Focus #1: Climatic and environmental controls on ecosystem-atmosphere energy and mass exchanges:
- Eddy covariance measurements of mass-energy exchanges between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere;
- Characterization and partitioning of water fluxes;
- Impacts of nutrient availability on carbon and water fluxes;
- Contribution to and analysis of large dataset (e.g. FLUXNET database);
Focus #2: Phenology and Ecosystem Processes
- Interactions and feedback between climate and land surface phenology;
- Understanding the relationship between phenology and water cycles;
- Development of tools for the measurements of land surface phenology;
Focus #3: Remote Sensing of Ecosystem Function
- Understanding the information about photosynthesis, ecosystem functioning and stress encoded into hyperspectral remote sensing observations and sun induced fluorescence (SIF);
- Evaluating factors affecting hyperspectral and SIF signals at different temporal scales;
- Evaluating drivers of the photosynthesis-SIF relationship in climate manipulation experiments;
Recent News
February 2023
The Eco-Met group has the first ever group photo in the beginning of 2023! We welcome Laura, who started her PhD in this January, and Arvind, who started his PhD in this February. Sinikka is moving forward for her PhD with a great momentum after coming back from her parental leave and she'll present her work at EGU. Stay tuned!
November 2022
We welcome Sinikka back from parental leave, and she'll continure her wrok on lysimeter and connection of it to eddy covariance data. The group aslo has a new member, Laura, joined us in November as a student assistant. In January 2023, she'll officially start her PhD working on controls of multi-scale CO2 fluxes at a savanna ecosytem.
July 2022
Heatwave at our Majadas de Tiétar research station
The site has been consistently getting >40 ºC during daytime for more than a week. Trees manage to stay green due to better access to deeper water sources compared to grasses, which are dried out. Our ecosystem-scale flux measurements can't see any photosynthesis happening during daytime, which is mainly caused by stomatal closure for water conservation.
The group has a new group leader!
To continue and re-design the successful research group Biosphere-Atmosphere Interactions and Experimentation previously led by Dr. Mirco Migliavacca (currently at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre) and Dr. Tarek El-Madany, Dr. Sung-Ching Lee joined the group as a new group leader. The new group will continue running the existing research site at Majadas de Tiétar, a semi-arid tree-grass ecosystem, and hence better understand the relevant understudied and unknown processes for dryland ecosystems.
Besides this, the new group has great interest in establishing coastal wetland (“Blue Carbon”) research in Germany, particularly in the Wadden Sea area. Unlike upland ecosystems, the exchanges between coastal ecosystems and the atmosphere are not only controlled by bio-meteorological variables but regulated by unique features such as salinity, tidal movements, and wind advections.
To reflect the new directions, the name of the group has been changed from Biosphere-Atmosphere Interactions and Experimentation (BAIE) to Eco-Meteorology (Eco-Met).
Experiments
