In the lead up to the 2014 Macquarie University Research Excellence Awards, This Week is profiling nominees each week before winners are announced at an Awards Dinner on Thursday 2 October.

Meet Dr Trevor Keenan from the Department of Biological Sciences who is a nominee for an Early Career Researcher of the Year – Science and Engineering Award.

How long have you been a researcher at Macquarie?
I joined Macquarie just over a year ago, with a Macquarie University Research Fellowship. With so many great researchers in the department it has been a fantastic experience so far.

What would be an ‘elevator pitch’ of your research area?
I broadly focus on the role of plants in the Earth system. My work focuses on both understanding how plants, primarily forests, are affected by climate change, and how long term climate is affected by the function of plants. This is key to our ability to project the future of the Earth’s climate. To do so, I use a combination of theory, models and observations from distributed sensor networks, in tandem with satellite remote sensing data. Results to date show remarkable changes in plant function worldwide, and shed light on what we should expect as the climate continues to warm.

In layman’s terms, what is the wider impact of your research?
Climate change is not a belief system, it is a physical fact driven by our emission of carbon dioxide (CO₂). Luckily for us, global ecosystems are helping to slow the pace of climate change. Each year plants remove a large amount of the CO₂ we emit, thus slowing the growth rate of atmospheric CO₂. Whether they will continue to do so under ongoing future climate change is largely unknown. Understanding the response of global ecosystems to current climate change is therefore really important, as both the climate, and society critically depend on them.

If I were given $1M in research funding, the first thing I would do is…
In the chronically underfunded area of climate change research, $1M can do a lot. Recent years have seen the spread of distributed observation networks, such as Australia’s Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network, which are providing vast amounts of data for ecosystem science. This presents a unique opportunity to advance our understanding, but funding for the man-power to ask the right scientific questions, and find the answers, remains scant. With $1M I would build a team of highly trained scientists with the objective of answering a simple question: How do we use the mountain of observations now available to provide policy-actionable information on the likely future of the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems.

Read more about Dr Keenan.