Dr. Alexis Berg

Hello!  Welcome to my webpage. 

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Montreal, in Montreal, Québec. 

As an Earth System scientist, my research interests focus on the interactions between the land surface and the climate system. I seek to understand the interplay between climate, terrestrial hydrology, and vegetation in the context of global climate & environmental changes, and what this means for the future of water and ecosystems resources human society depends on.

Central to these issues are the water/plant/atmosphere interactions taking place at the land-atmosphere interface. Indeed, the energy, water and carbon cycles are tightly coupled at the land surface, in myriads of ways.  The complexity of these land-atmosphere processes, ranging from plant physiology to boundary layer dynamics, is further compounded by the high spatial (and temporal) heterogeneity of the land surface, human perturbations (e.g., land-use change, irrigation), etc. 

My research is motivated by the desire to better understand how this nexus of coupled processes operate across a range of spatial and temporal scales, how they can best be represented in land/climate models, and ultimately how they modulate large-scale responses of climate, vegetation and hydrology in terms of variability, extremes, and changes under greenhouse warming. I am particularly interested in the role land-atmosphere processes play in future trends in droughts and aridity under climate warming. 

To address such questions, my works relies on primarily on analysis of large-scale observational data and a suite of numerical modeling tools, from land surface models to Global Climate Model (GCM) simulations. 

More about my research here.