Contact: Andy Bunn, WWU assistant professor of Environmental Science, (360) 650-4252.
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| WWU Assistant Professor of Environmental Science Andy Bunn, in the field in Siberia, summer 2009. Bunn is part of a team that will work with NASA on a project to research how the world's boreal forests are responding to climate change. |
| photo by Chris Linder |
BELLINGHAM – Andy Bunn, an assistant professor of Environmental Science at Western Washington University’s Huxley College of the Environment, is part of a new $289,000 grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to study how the planet’s boreal, cold-weather forests – chiefly those in Siberia – are responding to global climate change, and how that change could affect the rest of the world’s climate.
The grant enlists Bunn and his students, as well as co-collaborators at the University of Arizona, in NASA’s Land Cover and Land-Use Change Project; the researchers will work across a network of forest reserves in Siberia to find out how much carbon is stored in the forests – and how much of this carbon might potentially be released as carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas, as the planet warms.
“The boreal forest is the world’s largest and coldest terrestrial ecosystem,” said Bunn. “Understanding how these forests will grow in a warmer world is a key part of understanding the carbon puzzle.”
Logan Berner, a WWU graduate student from
For more information on Bunn’s project with NASA, contact him at (360) 650-4252 or at andy.bunn@wwu.edu.
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