Chair of Global Change Ecology

Research: My research is on quantifying and understanding the terrestrial carbon cycle and its links to global change. I study the interactions of plant and soil processes across environmental and biodiversity gradients from the tropics to the Arctic. I use process based modelling and data assimilation methods to extract information from detailed ecosystem measurements on feedback processes between soil, vegetation and the atmosphere, over timescales from days to years. Linking to remote sensing data, I use models to upscale process information to investigate landscape processes. I focus particularly on issues relating to the drought sensitivity of forests, the role of disturbance (fire or anthropogenic) on forest biomass, and the sensitivity of Arctic ecosystems to warming. Understanding and simulating the non-steady state behaviour of ecosystems is a current focal interest.

Teaching: I am course organiser for Ecological Measurement, a 3rd year field course based in the Scottish Highlands. I also teach a number of courses, including Biology, Ecology and Environment for 1st years.

I am the Director of Post-Graduate Teaching in the School of GeoSciences .

Current and recent activities

(1) I am working to better understand the response of the terrestrial arctic to changes in climate. I led the ABACUS consortium. ABACUS was a NERC-funded project dedicated to research on Arctic Biosphere-Atmosphere Coupling at multiple Scales, part of International Polar Year. I am now joint PI on a NERC project (2010-12) modelling the response of the Arctic to changing climate, building on ABACUS outputs.

(2) I am interested in using data to test and improve models of ecosystem processes. As such, I organised Carbon Fusion, an international network funded by NERC and focussed on using data assimilation approaches to improve understanding of the terrestrial carbon cycle; I am Data assimilation theme leader for JULES and member of the JULES Science Management committee.

(3) Principal investigator with the NERC National Centre for Earth Observation, leading the research strand on data assimilation in the carbon theme. Our work was recently selected as one of NERC's research highlights for 2007.

(4) Member of European Space Agency BIOMASS Mission Advisory Group

(5) Research on fire ecology and carbon sequestration in tropical woodlands in Africa and in the longleaf pine woodlands of the SE United States.

Models

For those interested in the Soil-Plant-Atmosphere (SPA) model, follow the link on the left to find details on the model, including access to the model handbook and various spreadsheets to assist model calibration and interpretation.

There is also a link to the Aggregated Canopy Model (ACM) - a simplified version of the SPA model, designed to predict daily ecosystem gross primary production given a simple set of driving variables. It is particularly useful for temporal and spatial extrapolation.

For information on the DALEC (data assimilation linked ecosystem carbon) model, see DALEC paper

Contact

School of GeoSciences
Institute of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences
Crew Building, Kings Buildings
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, EH9 3JN, UK
Tel: + 44 (0) 131 650 7776
email: mat.williams@ed.ac.uk