Dr. Yanlan Liu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Earth Sciences and School of Environment and Natural Resources, here she shares about her personal and academic experiences.
I was born in the spring city Kunming in southwestern China, where I spent my childhood hiking in alpine forests, snowy mountains, wetlands, and subtropical forests. While my eyes were busy looking for fruits and mushrooms, thinking back, I suppose every bit of nature left a mark in my mind. After high school, I headed north to Beijing to study Hydraulic Engineering at Tsinghua University. Ironically, I did not have a deep understanding of my major initially. But I enjoyed math, physics, and mechanics classes till my junior year, when I got anxious about not finding passion in making concretes and building structures. It wasn’t until I got into a hydrology class that the two things I had always been passionate about finally became clear: nature and numbers. After that, I knew I wanted to have more fun with them.
Fascinated by cool maps and numerical models trying to mimic how nature works, I decided to give scientific research a try. I went to Duke University for my PhD to study hydrology. It was the first time I came abroad. Learning to navigate in a completely different world was an interesting experience. The greatest gift I got from this experience was being open minded, both in life and scientifically. Fortunately, I got chances to study and work with professors in multiple disciplines, who shaped my ways of thinking. I still remember feeling inspired in my first Bayesian Statistics class, and several classes later, I got an MS degree in Statistics. I also remember getting so excited about plants in discussions with professors that I could not resist digging deeper and found myself as an ecohydrologist years later. Before joining OSU, I was a postdoc at Stanford University and then Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where I got chances to expand my research horizon.
I am very excited to join OSU starting in fall 2021. I teach classes of Ecohydrology and Geostatistics, aiming to share my passion and experience in these fields and help students build expertise to support career development. The research in my group focuses on how plants and water interact, especially under future climate regimes. We investigate how plants drink (taking up water from the soil) and breathe (releasing water vapor into the atmosphere). While breathing out water vapor, plants also cool the land surface and absorb carbon from the atmosphere to support growth. Given the massive scale of vegetation cover on the Earth's surface, these dynamics directly affect how much water resources will be available, how droughts will develop and propagate, how fast atmospheric CO2 concentration will increase, and how stable and resilient plant ecosystems will be. Looking at a decadal time scale, we also study how vegetation distribution on the Earth has changed over the past several decades and how it will change in this century. For example, although many high-latitude regions are experiencing increased vegetation cover, forest loss is also widely observed due to increased droughts, fire, and insect disturbances. Our work aims to better understand and predict such changes in a warming climate. To push the scientific boundary in these topics, we use numerical models across spatial scales from a tree to the globe, and data-driven approaches that leverage in situ and satellite remote sensing observations. Our past and ongoing work span a variety of ecosystems, including Mediterranean forests, African forest gardens, wetlands, temperate and boreal forests, and Arctic tundra. We aim to use what we learn from nature to address challenges associated with natural resources security and sustainability.
Our small but energetic group has multiple exciting research projects waiting for motivated and talented students to join and get involved. I look forward to continuing the academic journey with the wonderful faculty and students here at OSU.