Kai’s 2016 PNAS paper won the Best Young Investigator Paper Award, recognized by the Sino-Ecologists Association Overseas (Sino-Eco). Kai received the award at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) 2017 Annual Meeting in Portland, OR.
From the July 2017 issue of Sino-Eco newsletter:
Dr. Kai Zhu is an assistant professor at University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Zhu completed his postdoc at Carnegie Institution for Science and Stanford University. Dr. Zhu received his Ph.D. in ecology and M.S. in statistics from Duke University. The awarded paper, titled “Nonlinear, interacting responses to climate limit grassland production under global change,” is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on September 20, 2016 as the cover article. The paper presents a 17-year synthesis of the responses of primary production to natural and simulated global change in the Jasper Ridge Global Change Experiment. The findings provide a clear picture of the way ecosystem responses to global changes combine components that are single-factor and interactive, and linear and non-linear. The results provide a window into ecosystem responses to climate change for a wide range of possible futures. The analysis enables a level of detailed exploration that has been unattainable with many other ecosystem-scale global change experiments.
