Prof Trevor Keenan, UC Berkeley
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Abstract:
The land absorbs nearly 30% of the CO2 that humans emit. With growing interest in nature-based climate solutions, we urgently need to know how, where and why that sink is changing. Eddy-covariance flux towers give the most direct measurements of how ecosystems exchange carbon, water and energy with the atmosphere. But the data are complex, and that has long limited their use: the last global FLUXNET release was in 2015. In this talk, I will describe the new FLUXNET Data System. It is a community-wide effort across regional networks worldwide. It delivers flux data that are processed and quality-controlled through a common pipeline, and openly licensed (CC-BY-4.0), along with new tools to find and access them. I will then show how longer, more consistent records let us ask questions we could not answer before. These range from detecting step changes, tipping points and gradual shifts in how ecosystems function to tracking long-term trends in productivity. Finally, I will discuss how AI is speeding up this work. Examples include foundation models that combine flux data with satellite imagery to improve carbon accounting for nature-based solutions, and AI-ready data infrastructure with agentic tools for exploring it. Together, these advances give stronger constraints for Earth system models and remote-sensing products, and a basis for near-term forecasting of the land carbon sink.
Bio:
Trevor Keenan is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Chen Chancellor's Chair in Climate Science and Solutions, and a Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He leads the Quantitative Ecosystem Dynamics Lab, which combines eddy-covariance flux networks, satellite and lidar remote sensing, machine learning and Earth system models to understand how terrestrial ecosystems respond to, and shape, a changing climate. He chairs the FLUXNET Community Council, directs the FLUXNET Coordination Project, and co-developed the NASA/IBM Prithvi-EO-2.0 Earth observation foundation model. He is a recipient of AGU's Piers J. Sellers Global Environmental Change Mid-Career Award.