Moving on…

Moving on…

bingI grew up in Beijing and got my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Peking University. My research interests are the interactions between forest carbon cycle and global environmental changes at multiple spatial and temporal scales. I arrived at University of Pennsylvania at 2011, and started to work with Dr. Fred Scatena. After he passed away suddenly in 2013, I transferred to Dr. Alain Plante’s lab. During my time in Plante’s lab, I completed my PhD project about the forest biomass and soil carbon stocks changes in the Delaware River Basin. This project was started from 2001, when 77 plots in three research area were established. I led a field crew with investigators from US Forest Service and Penn students, revisiting 61 of the plots, measuring forest biomass and collecting soil samples using two sampling methods. Forest biomass data from two field surveys were used to address the linkage between forest biomass C stock change and tree demographic change over the past decade. Two soil sampling methods were compared to reduce the uncertainties of soil CN content estimations. Based on the results of field measurements, a process-based ecosystem model (PnET-CN) was parameterized and used to simulate the spatial distribution of forest C pool and fluxes, and to qualify the impacts of environmental changes on forest C cycle. This project was supported by US Forest Service, and co-advised by Dr. Yude Pan. In the past five years, I had a very good time studying above and below- ground forest carbon cycles in the field, the lab and in the digital world. In the next few years, I will work as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Altaf Arain at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, and go on exploring forest carbon dynamics using micrometeorology and remote sensing technique.