The Future of Western US Forest Under Climate Change

Originally air February 8, 2024

EVENT DESCRIPTION: A Wallace Stegner Center Green Bag Our research aims to answer an urgent question: What is the future of Earth’s forests in a changing climate? Massive forest mortality events of many tree species in the last two decades prompt concerns that drought, insects, and wildfire may devastate forests in the coming decades. We study how drought and climate change affect forest ecosystems, including tree physiology, species interactions, carbon cycling, and biosphere-atmosphere feedbacks. This research spans a broad array of spatial scales from xylem cells to ecosystems and seeks to gain a better mechanistic understanding of how climate change will affect forests in the western U.S. and around the world. William Anderegg, Director of the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy and Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences William Anderegg is the Director of the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy and an Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Utah. He grew up hiking and camping in the mountains in Colorado. He received his bachelors and Ph.D. from Stanford University and did a NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship at Princeton University. He received the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation, an NSF CAREER award, the National Laureate in Life Sciences from the Blavatnik Family Foundation, the Packard Foundation Fellowship in Science and Engineering, and the Early Career Fellow from the Ecological Society of America. Watch the recording.