COG3

Professor of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University
Title: Plants, Carbon and Water: Molecular Tools to Study Terrestrial Paleoecology and Climate

Abstract: Climate, the water cycle and terrestrial ecosystems are tied tightly
to each other across spatial scales and through time. Humans are
paradoxically dependent on and impacting these systems at an
increasing pace and magnitude. Anticipating future water and plant
dynamics is difficult, and our knowledge of ancient terrestrial
climate is limited. Biomarkers from ancient landscapes potentially
encode both past hydrology and terrestrial ecology and are emerging as
important tools in many paleoclimate studies. These proxies are less
well developed than paleontological approaches, but preserve in more
diverse environments and offer potentially continuous archives from
lake and ocean sediments. The carbon and hydrogen isotope signatures
of modern leaf lipids are sensitive to water, plant types and
ecosystem structure. New studies of these relationships in modern
plants provide a stronger framework to reconstruct plant-carbon-water
linkages of the past.