Dr. Tang's
Ecosystem Modelling & Observation Integration Group (EMOI)
News:
Jan 2024: I was invited to give a talk at DENEMO Symposium, and my talk title is :Refining model realism of biological systems under #climatechange by integrating multiple scales of observations" at DANEMO Symposium (dynamics and #modelling of #biological #systems
Oct 2023: We organized the 2nd Summer school "Ecosystem modelling using LPJ-GUESS" at Beijing Normal University. There were in total 21 PhD and postdoc participants, with great interest in learning and setting up LPJ-GUESS for different research projects.
Sep,2023: Our new modelling study shows that high-latitude vegetation changes will determine future plant volatile impacts on atmospheric organic aerosols; see the paper here: https://rdcu.be/dmCDX #LPJ-GUESS #TM5
June, 2023: I am looking for a PhD candidate with some experiences in process-bsaed ecosystem modelling. The advertisement is here: https://candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationInit.aspx?cid=1307&ProjectId=159309&DepartmentId=19207&MediaId=4636.
June, 2023: I received a 1-year Crafoord project titled with "Impacts of tundra plants on Arctic warming: present and future".
Apr, 2023: I spent a wonderful week at EGU in Vienna, presented our latest work, and finally met many collaborators face-to-face after a few years of online meetings.
Research areas:
The Arctic experiences amplified warming and increased heatwaves. It is essential to understand how plants respond to these changes and alter their climate impacts. Through closely collaborating with many experimentalists and empiricists, we have added a variety of observation-based relationships into the process-based dynamic vegetation model, LPJ-GUESS. We explore
how climate change has and will alter greenhouse gas (i.e., CO2 and CH4) and BVOC emissions, see examples: Tang et al., 2015, Tang et al., 2016, and Rinnan et al., 2021
how climate-induced vegetation changes can chemically influence our climate, see Tang et al., 2022
how plant temperature differing from air temperature influences plant responses (ongoing);
Modelling soil biogeochemical processes
Dissolved matters are the decomposition product of plant and soil materials. Once these organic and inorganic matter entered water bodies, they can be decomposed by microbes and release greenhouse gases back to the atmosphere, and small fractions become sediments. Accurately representing both biotic and abiotic processes in influencing the concentration of dissolved matters is an important step in connecting land and water biogeochemical processes. I have extended LPJ-GUESS with detailed soil DOC processes (see Tang et al., 2018).
Another area of my focus is related to modelling soil BVOC dynamics. Soils can act as sources and sinks of BVOCs (see my review article Tang et al., 2019). Currently, both the source and sink processes have not yet been considered in ecosystem models. We have extracted data from the published papers, and are working on identifying emission response curves and ultimately modelling soil BVOC emissions with the dependence of material origins and environmental variables.
Landscape hydrological connectivity
Dynamic vegetation models often ignore water communications throughout the landscape, which potentially lead to uncertainties in simulated water and carbon fluxes. We are interested in connecting the simulated spatial units (e.g., gridcells) based on topographical information (see Tang et al., 2014 a, b)and representing landscape topology in the model (ongoing PhD project).
Land-lake nutrient interactions
We are interested in explaining the satellite-observed eutrophication patterns by linking land nutrient-related processes. In particular,
we explore how land-leached N regulates lake eutrophication occurrence, see example: Guan et al., 2022;
we identify interactions between land management with lake nutrient cycles in eutrophic lake catchments;
we dynamically couple land and lake models to understand the water, carbon and nutrient connections between land and lakes (a PhD student will be hired).
Outreach:
Dec, 2022, A news article about the recently published Nat. Comms paper about Earth's increased lake area. We also identified a particular increase in the number of small lakes, which, unfortunately, emit large amounts of greenhouse gas.
Oct, 2022, I wrote a popular summary related to this Nature Geosciences paper, https://www.nateko.lu.se/article/mapping-lacustrine-algal-blooms-globally: A global dataset on algal blooms was created using nearly 3 million Landsat satellite images at 30 m resolution taken between 1982 and 2019.
Aug, 2022: I was invited to record an iLEAPS Early Career podcast, talking about my career as an ecosystem modeller and also some suggestions for young scientists in applying for funding and positions. https://t.co/cvBC7fQJTC
Funded Projects:
2023-2024: PI in a Crafoord project titled "Impacts of tundra plants on Arctic warming: present and future".
2023-2028: PI in a 5-year Villum Young Investigator project "PAR-F": Plant temperature-regulated Arctic responses and feedbacks to the changing climate.
2017-present: participated in 5-yr ERC Consolidator project "TOVOLU": Tundra biogenic volatile emissions in the 21st century.
2018-present: PI in a 4-yr Swedish FORMAS project: Modelling Arctic biogenic volatile organic compounds Emissions and their impacts on regional air quality.
2020-2024: PI of a 3-yr STINT-NSFC project: Assessment of plant phenology impacts on terrestrial carbon and water cycles in northern ecosystems: combing climate change manipulation experiments and LPJ-GUESS modelling
2021-2024: participated in 3-yr DFF project: Birch forest volatile emissions -- impact of herbivory stress.
Archived news:
Apr, 2023: I am looking for a PhD and a Postdoc candidates to join my group, see more information by click here.
Mar,2023: From the 1st of May, I will join the Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen as Tenure-Track Assistant Professor.
Feb, 2023: Qi Guan has successfully defended his PhD thesis at the University of Copenhagen.
Jan, 2023: I received a 5-year Villum Young Investigator grant which examines how plant temperature (not air temperature) influences our understanding of arctic plants' responses and feedbacks to the changing climate. I will soon start to hire 1 PhD student and 1 Postdoc for this project, email me if you already want to know more details :)
Nov, 2022: Didac Pascual has successfully defended his PhD thesis at Lund University.
Aug, 2022: First LPJ-GUESS summer school has been successfully conducted. We got 35 talented students who were really eager to learn the details of the model and also have done excellent project work. This course is based on a collaborative project between Lund University and Beijing Normal University, funded by STINT and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
July, 2022: Through analysing 2.91 million Landsat satellite images and 248243 freshwater lakes, we found lakes worldwide have been experiencing increased extents of algal blooms over the past four decades. See the news here and the study published in Nat. Geos.
June, 2022: Dr. Tang has actively participated in Gordon Research conferences held in Oxnard, USA. She will be the chair for the next Gordon Research Seminar of Biogenic Hydrocarbons and the Atmosphere.