On Monday 28th of March 2011, Prof. Riccardo Valentini is giving the letcure “Full greenhouse gases accounting and carbon vulnerabilities of forest ecosystems” at the British Ecologica Society’s Annual Symposium “Forests and Global Change”.

This is a short abstract of the lecture:

We have today a reasonable understanding of the carbon cycle and the role of terrestrial ecosystems in shaping the current atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. Much less is known about other greenhouse gases i.e. methane and nitrous oxide emissions or uptake form forests and in general terrestrial ecosystems including soils. The basic idea of this talk is to expand our current analysis on carbon sources and sinks at the level of other greenhouse gases constituents, such as methane and nitrous oxide. We have recent evidence that forest soils can be an important source of such gases in specific conditions and areas of the globe. In particular tropical forests seem to be the dominant component of the N2O emissions globally as confirmed by “in situ”   observations and atmospheric inversion data. We discuss these new findings and their implications on the climate system. This analysis will be complemented by an assessment of vulnerabilities of pools and fluxes to a changing climate and its interactions with the human perturbations.

The BES Annual Symposium is an international conference of temperate and tropical forest ecologists, providing an opportunity to integrate perspectives on the changing nature of forests across biomes. The conference will address emerging themes in forest ecology based on new data from spatially dispersed permanent plot networks, fully mapped stands and satellite imagery. As well as plenary sessions featuring keynote speakers there will be opportunities for contributed talks and posters.

More information on the  British Ecological Society’s web site

Picture by dmitri_66 on Flickr