Talking Plant Science: Peter Reich

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Plant Success in Nature and Agriculture is proud to bring you the next seminar in our Talking Plant Science series presented by Professor Peter Reich.

From plant traits to biodiversity-ecosystem function to climate mitigation and justice: A journey across scales, disciplines, and domains

Understanding and stewarding nature is our collective challenge.

Will ecosystems maintain their biodiversity and function under global environmental change, and continue to sequester carbon and slow climate change?  Can traits (means and diversity) simplify the complexity of ecology enough that we can make predictable sense of it? To help address these issues I engage in studies at scales from leaf to globe and on topics from ecophysiology to community assembly to biogeochemistry. This work ranges from identification of global trait-tradeoff and metabolic response functions; to ecosystem-scale experiments with factors such as CO₂, temperature, rainfall, fire and biodiversity; to cross-continental observations and earth system modeling of global biogeochemical cycles. Using examples from diverse ecosystems I will show how framing research around fundamental hypotheses about complex issues, and how they scale across hierarchies, space and time, can help uncover both predictable general patterns and unexpected surprises.

Such understanding is also useful to how we might approach natural climate solutions, which need to consider not just carbon sequestration but impacts of, and impacts on, biodiversity and justice too. And finally, we ecologists need to better link our domains (e.g. natural climate solutions) with other pathways to decarbonization. If we combine increased acquisition and storage of carbon on land with just decarbonization via increased energy efficiency, reliance on renewable energy, and electrification, we can slow and stop climate change (and save a boatload of money) by mid-century.

Justly and too late, yet just in time.

Professor Peter Reich

Peter B. Reich is Director of the Institute for Global Change Biology at the University of Michigan, and has long-standing affiliations with the Department of Forest Resources, University of Minnesota and the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University. Reich helped pioneer the development and up-scaling of trait-based ecology and is a world leader in running state-of-the-art ecosystem-scale climate change and biodiversity experiments. He also helped launch the science education channel, MinuteEarth, now with >750 million views on various platforms. Reich is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and a BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Laureate in Ecology and Conservation Biology. He is an avid but extremely mediocre cross-country skier and piano player, and also regularly engages (with a bit less frustration) in pick-up basketball and bread baking. He worries incessantly about the state of people and nature on our planet, yet despite so much evidence of our collective failures, is an optimist about our shared future.