News

October 14, 2019

Alex co-organizes workshop on 'Sensing Forest Water Dynamics from Space: Towards Predicting the Earth System Response to Droughts' at Caltech's Keck Institute for Space Studies.

To find out more about the workshop and see Alex's introductory talk about remote sensing of vegetation water content, click here. Yanlan and Natan were also among the 34 international attendees of the workshop. Thnak you to all the attendees for stimulating discussions!

September 18, 2019

Nathan's paper on SMAP soil moisture and peatland fires is now out at ERL!

The paper shows that, contrary to popular wisdom, vegetation density is sufficiently low (likely due to land use change) in many Insular Southeast Asian peatlands to allow for soil moisture retrieval using SMAP. SMAP soil moisture carries information about burned area with as much as 30 days lag time, and provides information not contained in commonly-used precipitation metrics, because soil moisture is also influenced by anthropogenic canal-building in the area. The paper can be found here. Stanford's press release about the article can be found here

September 1, 2019

Greg and Caroline present at the Chapman conference on Carbon-Climate Feedbacks in San Diego

Caroline presented her work about the effect of pluvials on ecosystem growth, and Greg presented on parameter uncertainty vs. structural uncertainty in CARDAMOM and other models, as well as an attribution of historical CO2 uptake due to climate change.

September 1, 2019

Alex becomes a Center Fellow, by courtesy, at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment

July 31, 2019

Yanlan Liu joins the group as a postdoc after completing her PhD at Duke

Yanlan was previously a visiting student in summer of 2018. Welcome back, Yanlan!

July 29, 2019

Alex, Nathan, and Krishna go to IGARSS!

Check out Nathan's and Krishna's talks, and the sessions on Vegetation Optical Depth!

July 8, 2019

Alex, Natan, and Leander Anderegg take field measurements for SMAPVEX18

We are working with Alexandre Roy (Université du Québec à Trois Rivières) and others to compare in situ L-band radiometry at Harvard Forest with various measurements of tree water status

June 17, 2019

Alex, Greg, and Caroline attend 'CARDAMOM camp' at the University of Edinburgh

Researchers from several groups spent a week discussing opportunities and results with the CARDAMOM model-data fusion system

June 11, 2019

Mike, Nathan, and Krishna all receive SE3 mentoring award

Congratulations to Michael Burnett, Nathan Dadap and Krishna Rao for winning the Stanford School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences Certificate for Outstanding Achievement in Mentoring!

June 5, 2019

Alex's paper on satellite-driven estimates of heterotrophic respiration is now published at Biogeosciences!

The paper can be found here. It inverts the carbon balance using remote sensing data to constrain heterotrophic respiration.

April 14, 2019

Krishna's article on VOD-estimated relative water content as an indicator of drought-driven tree mortality is now out!

The article was published in Remote Sensing of Environment and can be found here.

April 1, 2019

Kim Novick’s paper article (with Alex and Pierre Gentine) on isohydricity and land-atmosphere interactions is now available in Plant, Cell, and Environment

The paper explores how variations in leaf water potential due to factors such as leaf area index and vapor pressure deficit. Based on modelling and FLUXNET results, these factors can disrupt the relationship between apparent isohydricity and stomatal function across sites, but not within a site. You can find the paper here.

April 1, 2019

Alex, Krishna and Susan Steele-Dunne’s invited review on microwave remote sensing of vegetation water content is now available at New Phytologist

The article is a short Tansley Insight article and will become part of a virtual issue on remote sensing for plant science. You can find it (open access) here.

April 1, 2019

Abstract deadline for AGU Chapman Conference on Carbon-Climate Feedbacks is May 8th

Please submit your abstract here. The conference will be in San Diego from August 26-29. This will be a great way to bring together an intimate gathering of a small group of people interested in carbon-climate feedbacks. Alex is on the program committee.

April 1, 2019

Check out Greg's talk on capturing sources of NBE uncertainty at EGU!

Greg will be speaking at 12:15 on Tuesday in Session BG2.48 on "Net Biosphere Exchange in the Recent Past: Uncertainty Comparison Between Model-data Fusion and Earth System Models"

January 8, 2019

Alex is a panelist at the Inez Fung symposium at AMS 2019.

We also presented a poster on Mike Burnett's work on ET in the Congo!

December 7, 2018

Come hear about the group's research at AGU!

We'll be presenting: B33N-2872 (Krishna's work on fire fuel estimation with Sentinel-1), B51G-2013: (Greg's work comparing CARDAMOM, CMIP5, and TRENDY, oh my!), B53D-07 (Yanlan's work on plant hydraulic traits and ET), H44A-04 (Mike's work on using GRACE to estimate ET in the Congo basin), and B31J-2627 (Alex's work on global, data-driven heterotrophic respiration estimates)

December 3, 2018

New Nature Plants paper using SMAP VOD to show pulse-reserve behavior is widespread

Alex collaborated on this paper led by Andrew Feldman (MIT). It can be found here

September 24, 2018

Alex attends AGU Chapman Conference on Hydrologic Research in the Congo Basin

In Mike's absence, Alex will present his work on estimating ET in the Congo River Basin via a water balance approach, and trends in the seasonality of ET in the basin.

September 23, 2018

Caroline Famiglietti and Natan Holtzman join the group

Welcome, Natan and Caroline!

September 21, 2018

Article (led by Bill Anderegg) on how hydraulic diversity increases forest drought resilience is now published at Nature

The flux tower based analysis is supplemented by a global analysis using VOD data that Alex led. The article can be found here.

June 27, 2018

Guadalupe Alvarez joins the group for the summer

Guadalupe is a rising senior at University of Texas - El Paso. She will be working with Nathan to characterize drainage patterns from anthropogenic canals in Insular Southeast Asia. Welcome, Guadalupe!

June 14, 2018

Krishna and Nathan win NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship

Krishna Rao was awarded the 3-yr fellowship to support his PhD studies on using SAR for canopy mortality studies. Nathan Dadap will use the fellowship to support his PhD work on mapping soil moisture in Southeast Asian peatlands to better estimate fire and CO2 emissions. Congratulations, Nathan and Krishna!

June 4, 2018

SMAP MT-DCA data available for download

SMAP MT-DCA data are now available via anonymous ftp. Instructions are on the datasets page.

June 1, 2018

Francesco Giardina's paper on tree height and photosynthesis in the Amazon published at Nature Geoscience

The paper shows that the photosyntheis of taller Amazon forests is up to tree times less sensitive to precipitation than than of shorter forests. You can find it here

June 1, 2018

Yanlan Liu joins the group for the summer

Yanlan is currently a PhD student at Duke. She'll be working on comparing ET model performance between approaches with and without plant hydraulics. Welcome, Yanlan!

April 27, 2018

Hamed Alemohammad's paper on P-band radar scattering mechanisms is now published at RSE

You can find it here

April 27, 2018

Michael Burnett wins first place at the Stanford Big Earth Hackathon

Congrats, Mike!

March 13, 2018

Alex wins a NASA New (Early Career) Investigator award

The research will employ model-data fusion in a plant hydraulic model to improve hydrologic modelling

February 26, 2018

Dr. Greg Quetin joins the group

Welcome, Greg! Greg completed his PhD with Abby Swann at the University of Washington and will be working on understanding on the drought response of tropical carbon fluxes using CARDAMOM and other tools.

January 19, 2018

Jackie and Mike join the group

Jackie Fortin (MS student in CEE) and Mike Burnett (senior in Earth Systems) join the group. Welcome!

January 9, 2018

EOS highlights Mostafa's paper on disentangling biomass and water stress contributions to VOD

The spotlight article can be found here.

December 7, 2017

The Remote Sensing Ecohydrology group goes to AGU!

Our talks and posters:
Nathan: B13D-1794: Using Remotely Sensed Soil Moisture to Estimate Fire Risk in Tropical Peatlands

Mostafa: B24C-02: Interacting Effects of Leaf Water Potential and Biomass on Vegetation Optical Depth

Krishna: B31D-2009: Vegetation optical depth measured by microwave radiometry as an indicator of tree mortality

Alex: H14A-01: Stomatal and xylem regulation traits control the sensitivity of grassland productivity to aridity

November 18, 2017

Yan Li's paper on estimating isohydry with active vs. passive measurements is now in press at JGR-B

You can find it here

November 18, 2017

Mostafa's paper discussing the effect of leaf water potential variations on vegetation optical depth is now in press at JGR-B!

You can find it here

October 24, 2017

After a long period in press, our paper in Global Change Biology on ecosystem-scale isohydricity estimates from microwave measurements is now fully published.

January 21, 2017

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