Tropical Forests in a Changing Climate
Event Type: Seminar
Event Date: 23 Jan 2018
Venue: ASE 3D Viz Laboratory Room (N2-B1c-16c)
Speaker: Michael O'Brien
About the speaker:
Michael O'Brien is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at ETH–Zurich, working in the group of Dr Johnathan Levine. He received his Doctorate in Ecology from the University of Zurich with a dissertation The Role of Functional-traits in the Response of Tropical Forests to Global Change. After graduating he joined the University of Zurich as a member of the University Research Priority Program on Global Change and Biodiversity. He later became a Postdoctoral fellow at the Experimental Station of Arid Zones as part of the Spanish National Research Council focused on disentangling competition, facilitation and climate on community assembly with projects in Spain, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Malaysia before joining ETH-Zurich.
About the event:
Climate change is a significant global change driver that is altering carbon cycles, temperature ranges and precipitation patterns in terrestrial ecosystems on every continent. Understanding the implications of these climatic changes for forest systems is a significant challenge facing modern ecology, especially in biodiversity hotspots like tropical rainforests. My work has focused on disentangling the relative importance of plant traits, plant–plant interactions and community dynamics as variables mediating forest responses to changing precipitation patterns (i.e. frequency and severity of drought). Although my experiments are spread throughout the tropics and other climatic-zones, I focus on the results from research based in Malaysian Borneo. I will highlight insights into how tropical trees respond to novel precipitation patterns from single drought events to recurring droughts, and I explore the effects of drought from the individual to community level. I will finish the seminar by offering knowledge-gaps that have developed from my previous research projects and present experiments that I am pursuing to address these knowledge-gaps while also expanding my exploration into different global change drivers.