Welcome!
Our group, led by Prof. Alexandra Konings, studies how ecosystems and the water cycle interact at regional to global scales, and how that will change under future climate. These processes are influenced by the diversity in vegetation behavior across earth's hundreds of thousands of species. We therefore seek to understand how that diversity aggregates to larger scale behavior. While our research spans a range of topics, we are particularly interested in the movement of water through plants. We believe that a deep understanding of remote sensing techniques helps us do better science and therefore also work on developing new remote sensing datasets and their validation, especially microwave proxies of vegetation water content.
Our research primarily falls along five main lines:
- Plant hydraulics
- Remote sensing of vegetation water content
- The effects of small-scale trait variability on regional-scale ecosystem behavior
- Wildfire dynamics
- Water-carbon coupling in tropical ecosystems
