Emily Peters, a Ph.D. student from Professor Joe McFadden’s group, has won honors from the American Geophysical Union for her research on urban forests. Her paper “Biological and environmental controls on tree transpiration in a suburban landscape,” with co-authors Dr. McFadden and Rebecca Montgomery, was published on October 8th in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences. She received an Outstanding Student Paper Award from the Hydrology Section of AGU for her presentation of these results at the Fall Meeting. Many in Geography know Emily from her visits to the Department and from AGU meetings over the past two years.
“Recent studies have provided improved descriptive characteristics of urban forests,” said Dr. McFadden, “but we still don’t have a very good understanding of how they work–the processes by which they affect the environment of cities and beyond.” “Emily’s paper quantifies how evapotranspiration by the major groups of urban tree species differs in response to changes in the environment,” he continued. “This provides critical information that is needed before we can use tools like satellite imagery to scale up effects of trees on the urban and suburban water budget,” Dr. McFadden said.
Emily successfully defended her dissertation this summer, and she is currently working as a postdoc in the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. Kudos and best wishes to Emily!
