Please join us at the Given Institute for a lecture on

The Surprising Importance of Forests in Global Warming

Will migration of Russian forests promote warming?

Wednesday, August 15th at 6:30pm

Presented by:

Dr. Hank Shugart, Jr.

Director of the Center for Regional Environmental Studies at the University of Virginia

About the Lecture

Dr. Shugart’s talk will forcus on the role of forests in the global carbon cycle.  This talk addresses the popular understanding that growing trees is a good thing (because it removes carbon dioxide from the air and reduces greenhouse warming) and provides more details about how the Earth's carbon cycle works.  What we do (and don't) know about how this essential "Earth life support" system works is worth understanding.  The talk will treat the unique importance of Russian forests in the global carbon cycle – and present the unexpected results that show that climate warming might change the Russian forests in ways that may actually promote additional warming. 

Dr. Shugart will close his talk by making the surprising point that Russian compliance with the Kyoto Protocol (by re-growing forests) might actually produce a warming -- the opposite of the intent of the Kyoto protocol.

About the Speaker

Herman H. ("Hank") Shugart, Jr. is the W.W. Corcoran Professor of Environmental Sciences and the Director of the Center for Regional Environmental Studies at the University of Virginia. Dr. Shugart is a systems ecologist whose primary research interests focus on the simulation modeling of forest ecosystems. He has developed and tested models of biogeochemical cycles, energy flow and secondary succession. In his most recent work, he uses computer models to simulate the growth, birth and death of each tree on small forest plots. The simulations describe changes in forest structure and composition over time, in response to both internal and external sources of perturbation. The models are applied at spatial scales ranging in size from small forest gaps to entire landscapes and at temporal scales of years to millennia. He received his Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Georgia in 1971, and worked for the next 13 years in Tennessee -- eventually as a Senior Research Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and as a Professor in Botany and the Graduate Program in Ecology at the University of Tennessee. In 1984, he moved to his current position at University of Virginia. Dr. Shugart has also served as a Visiting Fellow in the Australian National University (1978-1979, 1993-1994), in Australia's Commonwealth Industrial and Scientific Research Organization, Division of Land Use Research (1982) and Division of Wildlife and Ecology (1993-1994), in the International Meteorological Institute at the University of Stockholm, Sweden (1984), and in the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria (1987, 1989). He has served on the editorial board of several scholarly journals including Ecology and Ecological Monographs, Annual Reviews in Ecology and Systematics, Biological Conservation, Landscape Ecology, Journal of Vegetation Science, Forest Science, Global Change Biology and The Australian Journal of Botany. He is of than 340 publications including 15 books, 77 book chapters and 137 papers in peer-reviewed journals.