Research Expertise and Interest

global change, natural climate solutions, Dynamic Vegetation, carbon cycle, ecophysiology, land-atmosphere interactions, biogeochemistry, micrometeorology, remote sensing, mathematics and data science

Research Description

Trevor F. Keenan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley, and a Scientist in the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.


Over the past two decades, his work has focused on ecosystem carbon sequestration and long-term ecosystem dynamics, as well as related feedbacks to the atmosphere through water use and energy flows. He has a broad interdisciplinary background with formal training in mathematics, ecology and earth system science.

Prof. Keenan's interdisciplinary group at UC Berkeley combines large ecological data sets (e.g., eddy-covariance, remote sensing), mathematical modeling, and machine learning/data assimilation/mining tools, with results from in-situ field studies and experiments, to gain a mechanistic understanding of ecosystem function. The group uses methods from diverse disciplines, including ecophysiology and biogeochemistry, micrometeorology, atmospheric science, mathematics, statistics and high-performance computing. 

Read more about the members and work in the Berkeley Keenan Group: https://www.keenangroup.info/

Information about the group's publications: www.keenangroup.info/publications.html

In the News

NSF awards $2 million to the FLUXNET Coordination Project

A project led by Trevor Keenan has received $2 million in funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue essential research in understanding ecosystem-atmosphere interactions, and the response of these to environmental change. Named the FLUXNET Coordination Project, it will link over ten existing national and international networks focused on continuous observations of ecosystem-atmosphere interactions at over 1,000 locations around the world. The project will fill fundamental knowledge gaps in science, engineering, and societal issues associated with ongoing changes in ecosystem function and the related cycling of carbon and water. 

Featured in the Media

Please note: The views and opinions expressed in these articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or positions of UC Berkeley.
August 31, 2018

Climate change has the Arctic seeing green

MyScience

As the Arctic warms and previously barren land turns green, a team of Berkeley scientists has come up with a way to calculate the magnitude of change. Led by assistant environmental science, policy, and management professor Trevor Keenan, who has a joint appointment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the researchers have found that 16 percent of the land that used to be too cold for extensive plant growth is now warm enough for vegetation. By 2100, they estimate that only 20 percent of the northern hemisphere's vegetated land will be hampered by cold temperatures. "Although the greening might sound like good news as it means more carbon uptake and biomass production, it represents a major disruption to the delicate balance in cold ecosystems," Professor Keenan says. This story originated at Berkeley News.

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