Vegetation Dynamics

David Moore is a broadly trained plant ecologist and ecosystem scientist. His research centers on the changing role of forests in the carbon cycle and the controls of carbon use and allocation in plants and ecosystems. His research uses a broad range of observation types from ground measurements to satellite remote sensing and focuses of time series of ecosystem processes and the timings of transitions between ecosystem states both seasonally and interannually. After receiving his undergraduate degree in Botany at University College Dublin, David worked for the National Parks and Wildlife Service in Ireland, carrying out biological inventories of the stoney beaches of the Irish coast. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois working primarily at the Duke Forest Free Air Carbon dioxide Enrichment experiment in Chapel Hill, NC. In 2006/07 David was a postdoctoral researcher in Boulder, CO at the Co-operative Institute for Research in Environmental Science (CIRES). During that time he worked both at the University of Colorado and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) where he worked on integrating data from an eddy flux tower into an ecosystem model and also on the Airborne Carbon in the Mountain Experiment. He took a faculty position at King's College London in 2007 until 2011 and served as a visiting scientist to the Data Products group at the National Ecological Observatory Network in 2010/2011 before joining the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Arizona in 2011.

I seek to understand the hydrometeorological and ecological aspects of the biosphere-atmosphere interaction in a wide variety of ecosystem across the Earth, and how land surface processes can be improved in land surface models schemes. I have particularly studied different aspects of the water, energy, and especially carbon dynamics in the Amazon basin, integrating in situ measurements from eddy covariance flux towers and land surface models with state-of-the-art model sensitivity analysis and parameter estimation techniques. In recent years, I have contributed to the understanding of the impacts of land-use/land-cover change in forest dynamics, such as small-scale deforestation in the Amazon rainforest using regional atmospheric models, and impact of selective-logging on land surface models parameter calibration. In addition, my colleagues and I have also contributed to a broader understanding of the climatic conditions of the Amazon basin during the Large-scale Biosphere-atmosphere experiment in Amazonia (LBA) relative to long-term climatology. I am also interested in understanding how tropical rainforest ecosystems may respond to changing climate in the next coming decades, and for that my colleagues and I have used the unique characteristics found inside the Biosphere2 Tropical Rainforest Biome to implement a land surface parameterization scheme, and to identify potential vegetation responses under a wide range of climatic conditions. My research colleagues and I implemented the first carbon-based land surface model into NASA Land Information System which will allow high-resolution, global spatial coverage assessment of the carbon dynamics and its feedbacks with land surface properties and potential impacts on energy and water balance. The ultimate objective of my research is to improve the linkage between hydrometeorology and ecology by integrating land surface models with optimization and data assimilation techniques.

I study how climate change in the Western US is influencing the carbon and water cycles in mountain forests.  I also study how the emissions of organic compounds from forests across the globe influence atmospheric chemistry, particularly with regard to the the lifetime of compounds that influence climate.  In the past, I have studies plant-microorganism interactions in the alpine ecosystem nitrogen cycle and I have studied the evolution of C4 photosynthesis in plants.

I have been studying the plant ecology of our region since 1954, when I began teaching at the University of Arizona. I later joined the U. S. Geological Survey. I have coauthered several books. Among them, The Changing Mile (1965), The Changing Mile Revisited (2003), Bibliography of Repeat Photography for Evaluating Landscape Change (1984), The Ribbon of Green:Change in Riparian Vegetation in the Southwester United States (2007), Sonoran Desert Plants: An Ecological Atlas (1995), Repeat Photography:Methods and Applications in the Natural Sciences (2010),  Kenya's Changing Landscape (1998).

My interest lies in the dynamics of the region's vegetation with a drive for determining the causes for the changes.