The School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Presents Dr. Debjani Sihi, Emory University

Predicting Soil Organic Matter and Greenhouse Gas Emissions using State-of-art Biogeochemical and Machine Learning Models

I am a biogeochemist and ecosystem ecologist with a broad research interest in soil organic matter dynamics and greenhouse gas emissions from natural and managed ecosystems. The fate of land-atmosphere exchange of CO2, CH4, and N2O remains uncertain under current and future climate, partly due to our limited understanding of belowground processes. I address these critical knowledge gaps by coupling subsurface soil process measurements with surface chamber fluxes and landscape-scale fluxes to allow the scaling-up of process-based (and data-driven) models and soil-flux measurements to the ecosystem scale.

In this talk, I will explore existing theories of biology, physics, chemistry, and mathematics to advance understanding and prediction of biogeochemical feedbacks in terrestrial systems using case studies ranging from the tropics to sub-boreal ecosystems.