Global environmental change causes variable pattern of the gas and energy exchange within terrestrial ecosystems. In the remote sensing of water systems group, we investigate how a changing environment impacts the functioning of vegetation ecosystems and focus on related consequences for the terrestrial water cycle. We develop and apply field, airborne, and space borne imaging spectroscopy techniques to extract novel informative priors of plant photosynthesis, including sun-induced chlorophyll fluorescence, and other key environmental variables driving plant-water relations in vegetation ecosystems. The combination of these remote sensing techniques with principles of ecohydrology and soil-plant-atmosphere-continuum (SPAC) based process modeling allows us to assess spatio-temporal fields of water storage and flow in the soli-vegetation-atmosphere system. We are further interested how environmental change impacts the relation between plant transpiration and gross primary productivity to better constrain estimates of water use efficiency in agricultural and natural ecosystems.
Prof. Dr. Alexander Damm
University of Zurich
Department of Geography
8057 Zürich
Tel: +41 44 63 55251