Scott Saleska

Faculty Fellow 2014-2016

Dr. Scott Saleska is an ecosystem ecologist who studies and teaches about the role of living organisms in the earth’s climate. His research focuses on carbon-cycle feedbacks to climate in ecosystems ranging from Amazonian tropical forests to the Arctic thawing permafrost. In particular, his work addresses a fundamental challenge in biology-climate interactions, that of scaling: how to translate scientific understanding about the ecology of individual organs (such as leaves on trees) and organisms (such as microbes in the soil) to the level of landscapes, ecosystems, and the atmosphere, which is the scale of interactions with the global climate. He integrates classical ecological methods (such as forest surveys) with advanced techniques – including remote sensing from aircraft and satellites, laser spectroscopy for high-precision detection of atmospheric greenhouse gases, metagenomics of microbial communities, and numerical models  – to gain insights into the question of how life on earth influences the climate, now and in the future. He serves on the science steering committee of the University of Arizona’s Biosphere 2 and as director of the Amazon forest Partnership for International Research and Education (Amazon-PIRE), an international collaboration (funded by the National Science Foundation and partners in Brazil) that seeks both to advance research on the future of Amazon forests under climate change and to advance the education and training of future science leaders in both the U.S. and Brazil.