From satellites to stomata : measuring and modeling vegetation responses to water stress at ecosystem scale
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The response of plants to water stress is a first-order control on the water and carbon cycles, and plays a key role in wildfire, crop productivity, and forest mortality. While water stress response has been studied extensively in individual plants, ecosystem-scale data and models are largely missing, limiting our ability to understand plant water stress effects at large spatial scales. This dissertation helps address that gap. In Chapter 2, I present the first field experiment directly testing the sensitivity of microwave radiometry (a type of remote sensing) to plant water potential in a forest. I show that vegetation optical depth derived from radiometry mirrors diurnal and seasonal changes in tree leaf water potential. In Chapter 3, I use a simulation experiment to investigate how plant traits describing water stress response could be estimated with microwave radiometry from satellites in various orbits combined with a land surface model. Encouragingly, using two satellites similar to those already in Sun-synchronous orbits yields similar accuracy to using a geostationary satellite observing at all hours of the day, which has been proposed but would be much more expensive in practice. In Chapter 4, I focus on one key mechanism of water stress: the closing and opening of stomata on plant leaves. I introduce a new model of stomatal response to water stress, I empirically estimate the time scales that stomatal responses to water stress appear to be optimized for in a range of ecosystems, and I relate those time scales to ecosystem climate characteristics. Overall, the results presented in my dissertation can help see the forest for the trees - that is, help understand how water stress affects entire ecosystems. In the future, this work could be extended to predict vegetation responses to the increased stresses of climate change and identify hot spots of vulnerability or resilience, among other applications.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2024; ©2024 |
| Publication date | 2024; 2024 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Holtzman, Nataniel Moishe |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Konings, Alexandra |
| Thesis advisor | Konings, Alexandra |
| Thesis advisor | Jackson, Rob |
| Thesis advisor | Lobell, David |
| Thesis advisor | Schroeder, Dustin |
| Degree committee member | Jackson, Rob |
| Degree committee member | Lobell, David |
| Degree committee member | Schroeder, Dustin |
| Associated with | Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Earth System Science |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Nataniel Holtzman. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Earth System Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2024. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/xj284rj4922 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2024 by Nataniel Moishe Holtzman
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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