News from the Land-CRAFT Center
Greetings from the Land-CRAFT Center. It was nice to meet everyone at AGRO Days this past week. I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce myself as the new professor of Landscape Biogeochemistry in the Agroecology Department for those who I did not get to meet.
My expertise is soil carbon cycling, greenhouse gas emissions, and wetlands (particularly those with peat and permafrost). My favorite greenhouse gas is methane. I’ve used many different approaches in my research, including measurements, laboratory experiments, data synthesis, and process-based modeling. Some of my favorite research projects have used data to benchmark and evaluate process-based models. So far, I’ve looked at the representation of winter and cold season processes in methane models, peatlands in the global carbon cycle over geological time scales, and the representation of methane emitting areas in northern methane budgets. In Land-CRAFT, I’m leading the modeling theme, where we are developing and improving models for greenhouse gas emissions (especially N2O) from agriculture and the representation of farm-level emissions. My research program will study the hot spots and hot moments of greenhouse gas emissions. With this, we can evaluate the contribution of small areas and time periods to the landscape and regional budgets to determine what level of detail is really necessary to accurately represent agricultural emissions. We will start by looking at microtopographic features in the landscape: the inundated pools that are now common in many fields with all the rain we’ve had this year. I’m looking forward to discussing more with you all and would like to thank everyone for the warm welcome to Agroecology.
- Claire Treat, Professor, Landscape Biogeochemistry, Land-CRAFT Center.