About

Susan E. Trumbore, Ph.D., is a Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry and a Scientific Member at the same institute. She holds a B.S. in Geology from the University of Delaware (1981), and earned her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in Geochemistry from Columbia University by 1989. Her post-doctoral research was conducted at the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich between 1989 and 1991. She has served as an Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Full Professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine, from 1991 to 2000. Since 2009, she has been a Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, where her research focuses on biogeochemical processes.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Geology
• Environmental science
• Soil science
• Ecology
• Geography
• Atmospheric sciences
• Database
• Archaeology
• Library science
• Physical geography
• Forestry
• Chemistry
• Materials science
• World Wide Web
• Meteorology
• Earth science
• Oceanography

Selected publications

• COSORE: A community database for continuous soil respiration and other soil‐atmosphere greenhouse gas flux data

  Global Change Biology · 2020 · 100 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Environmental science
  • Atmospheric sciences

  , the database design accommodates other soil-atmosphere measurements (e.g. ecosystem respiration, chamber-measured net ecosystem exchange, methane fluxes) as well as experimental treatments (heterotrophic only, etc.). We give brief examples of the types of analyses possible using this new community resource and describe its accompanying R software package.

  DOI

• Impacts of Degradation on Water, Energy, and Carbon Cycling of the Amazon Tropical Forests

  Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences · 2020 · 104 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Environmental science
  • Geography

  Selective logging, fragmentation, and understory fires directly degrade forest structure and composition. However, studies addressing the effects of forest degradation on carbon, water, and energy cycles are scarce. Here, we integrate field observations and high-resolution remote sensing from airborne lidar to provide realistic initial conditions to the Ecosystem Demography Model (ED-2.2) and investigate how disturbances from forest degradation affect gross primary production (GPP), evapotranspiration (ET), and sensible heat flux (H). We used forest structural information retrieved from airborne lidar samples (13,500 ha) and calibrated with 817 inventory plots (0.25 ha) across precipitation and degradation gradients in the eastern Amazon as initial conditions to ED-2.2 model. Our results show that the magnitude and seasonality of fluxes were modulated by changes in forest structure caused by degradation. During the dry season and under typical conditions, severely degraded forests (biomass loss ≥66%) experienced water stress with declines in ET (up to 34%) and GPP (up to 35%) and increases of H (up to 43%) and daily mean ground temperatures (up to 6.5°C) relative to intact forests. In contrast, the relative impact of forest degradation on energy, water, and carbon cycles markedly diminishes under extreme, multiyear droughts, as a consequence of severe stress experienced by intact forests. Our results highlight that the water and energy cycles in the Amazon are driven by not only climate and deforestation but also the past disturbance and changes of forest structure from degradation, suggesting a much broader influence of human land use activities on the tropical ecosystems.

  DOI

• Integrating the evidence for a terrestrial carbon sink caused by increasing atmospheric CO ₂

  New Phytologist · 2020 · 647 citations

  • Library science
  • Archaeology
  • Geography

  , albeit with uncertain magnitude and strong suggestion of a role for additional agents of global change.

  DOI

• An open-source database for the synthesis of soil radiocarbon data: International Soil Radiocarbon Database (ISRaD) version 1.0

  Earth system science data · 2020 · 107 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Database
  • Environmental science

  Abstract. Radiocarbon is a critical constraint on our estimates of the timescales of soil carbon cycling that can aid in identifying mechanisms of carbon stabilization and destabilization and improve the forecast of soil carbon response to management or environmental change. Despite the wealth of soil radiocarbon data that have been reported over the past 75 years, the ability to apply these data to global-scale questions is limited by our capacity to synthesize and compare measurements generated using a variety of methods. Here, we present the International Soil Radiocarbon Database (ISRaD; http://soilradiocarbon.org, last access: 16 December 2019), an open-source archive of soil data that include reported measurements from bulk soils, distinct soil carbon pools isolated in the laboratory by a variety of soil fractionation methods, samples of soil gas or water collected interstitially from within an intact soil profile, CO2 gas isolated from laboratory soil incubations, and fluxes collected in situ from a soil profile. The core of ISRaD is a relational database structured around individual datasets (entries) and organized hierarchically to report soil radiocarbon data, measured at different physical and temporal scales as well as other soil or environmental properties that may also be measured and may assist with interpretation and context. Anyone may contribute their own data to the database by entering it into the ISRaD template and subjecting it to quality assurance protocols. ISRaD can be accessed through (1) a web-based interface, (2) an R package (ISRaD), or (3) direct access to code and data through the GitHub repository, which hosts both code and data. The design of ISRaD allows for participants to become directly involved in the management, design, and application of ISRaD data. The synthesized dataset is available in two forms: the original data as reported by the authors of the datasets and an enhanced dataset that includes ancillary geospatial data calculated within the ISRaD framework. ISRaD also provides data management tools in the ISRaD-R package that provide a starting point for data analysis; as an open-source project, the broader soil community is invited and encouraged to add data, tools, and ideas for improvement. As a whole, ISRaD provides resources to aid our evaluation of soil dynamics across a range of spatial and temporal scales. The ISRaD v1.0 dataset is archived and freely available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2613911 (Lawrence et al., 2019).

  DOI

• The age distribution of global soil carbon inferred from radiocarbon measurements

  Nature Geoscience · 2020 · 325 citations

  • Environmental science
  • Soil science
  • Physical geography
  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eric A. Davidson

  116 shared

• J. W. Harden

  Stanford University

  106 shared

• Paulo Brando

  Yale University

  78 shared

• Kirsten Küsel

  Friedrich Schiller University Jena

  70 shared

• Carlos A. Sierra

  50 shared

• Xiaomei Xu

  University of California, Irvine

  47 shared

• Jan Muhr

  University of Göttingen

  47 shared

• Daniel Magnabosco Marra

  Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry

  47 shared

Awards & honors

• Nobel Prize
• Körber Prize
• Lasker Award
• Leibniz Prize
• Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award

Similar researchers at University of California, Irvine

• Simin Liuh-187
• Simona Murgiah-181
• Donald R. Blakeh-144
• Eric Rignoth-143
• Alex B Guentherh-131