Friday, April 19, 2024 1:45 pm, Mendenhall Laboratory Room 291 or online using this Zoom link
Dr. Kai Zhu
Associate Professor
School for Environment and Sustainability
University of Michigan
Email: zhukai@umich.edu
Host: Yanlan Liu
Plant biodiversity responses to climate change: Contrasting implications from forests and grasslands
Plants play a crucial role in the Earth’s carbon cycle and are vital to mitigating and adapting to climate change. Here, I discuss two studies examining how plant biodiversity responds to climate change. The first study analyzed forest inventory data across the eastern US and found little evidence of climate-mediated tree migration. The study quantified the differences between seedlings’ and adult trees’ extreme latitudes of a hundred species and suggested that most species did not migrate to higher latitudes, despite model predictions that they would shift their ranges due to climate warming. The failure to migrate raised concerns about future climate change risks because of delayed responses in the distribution of long-lived trees. In contrast, the second study focused on grasslands in the California Floristic Province and revealed a rapid response to climate change. With climate niche estimates of hundreds of species from nearly one million occurrence records, the results showed significant shifts towards species associated with warmer, drier locations, keeping pace with climate warming and drying. This finding was consistent across various observational sites and global change experiments, implying that climate change clearly and rapidly impacts the distribution of short-lived grasses.
Dr. Kai Zhu is a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, where he holds joint appointments in the Institute for Global Change Biology, the School for Environment and Sustainability, and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. In addition, Dr. Zhu is Affiliated Faculty with the Michigan Institute for Data Science, the Michigan Center for Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics, and the Michigan Institute for Computational Discovery and Engineering. Dr. Zhu’s research interests revolve around global change biology, ecological modeling, and environmental data science. He brings together his expertise in ecology, statistics, and computer science to advance the understanding of how plants and soil respond to environmental changes. His research spans a wide range of scales, from local experiments to global analyses. Dr. Zhu has been recognized for his contributions to the field, having received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, been elected as an Ecological Society of America Early Career Fellow, and won the New Phytologist Tansley Medal. Dr. Zhu completed his postdoctoral fellowship in global ecology at Stanford University, and earned his PhD degree in ecology and master’s degree in statistics from Duke University.
