Feb 21
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function: Beyond Carbon Dioxide and Water
This coming Monday we'll welcome Dr. Manuel Lerdau as our seminar speaker on February 21, 3:30-4:30 in 141 Olin.
Join us in the atrium at 3:00 for refreshments before the seminar.
Dr. Lerdau is Professor of Environmental Sciences and of Biology, University of Virginia and the title of his talk is “Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function: Beyond Carbon Dioxide and Water.”
He will bring an Evolutionary Ecological perspective to an important role that ecosystems play in Earth System Science, the modulation of atmospheric chemistry. He'll present recent results from his lab group regarding plant and microbial regulation of the uptake and emission of compounds crucial in air quality. Specifically, he will discuss the mechanisms regulating reactive hydrocarbon, reactive nitrogen, and ozone exchange between plants & soils and the atmosphere. He'll show how, even though these mechanisms are broadly distributed among organisms, important taxonomic/phylogenetic signals can be seen, and these signals have large impacts on relative and absolute exchange rates.
This seminar is hosted by Mark McKone.