The Department of Chemistry invites you to its departmental seminar today at 4:10 p.m. in Fulmer Hall, room 201.
Dr. Evan DeLucia from the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will present, The Changing American Landscape and its Connection to Climate.
Abstract: The earliest human civilizations managed land with fire, and later vast areas of the Earth’s surface were transformed by intensive agriculture. As we change the type of vegetation on the land surface and how it is managed, we directly affect the climate system. Terrestrial ecosystems exchange greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane—with the atmosphere, determining its ability to trap heat. The type of vegetation also determines how much solar radiation is reflected and how much energy is carried away by evaporation. The DeLucia laboratory has created a single metric—climate regulating value (CRV) that quantifies how land uses affect the climate system. Second only to the expansion of intensive, row-crop agriculture, a new bioenergy economy—one that depends on plants to produce liquid fuel—has the potential to alter the coupling of land and atmosphere. By combining field scale measurements of biogeochemical processes with coupled ecological-economic models, we demonstrate that the expansion of bioenergy crops in the rain fed eastern US can provide fuel and mitigate the emission of greenhouse gases e.g. provide a favorable CRV, while having minimal effects on the food supply. Our research suggests that expanded use of cellulosic biofuels can have a positive effect on the US energy portfolio.
This seminar is co-sponsored with the University of Idaho and the American Chemical Society Washington-Idaho Border Local section (http://wibs.sites.acs.org/).
