Ram Oren

With his graduate students, Oren quantifies components of the water cycle in forest ecosystems, and their responses to biotic and abiotic factors. Relying on the strong links between the carbon and water cycles, he also studies the components of the carbon flux and their response to these factors. Climate variability, including variations in air temperature, vapor pressure deficit, incoming radiation and soil moisture, and environmental change, including elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide, affect the intra- and inter-annual dynamics, and amounts of water used by forest ecosystems, and their spatial distribution, as well as carbon uptake and sequestration. In turn, the variation of water flux influence the temporal and spatial partitioning of incoming radiation between latent and sensible heat. The flow of water from soil through plant leaves into the atmosphere, and the exchange of water for CO₂ absorbed from the atmospheric, are among the processes theoretically best understood in plant and ecosystem physiology. Using these theories, local mass balance approaches, and detailed measurements of water and carbon flux and driving variables in the soil, plants, and the atmosphere, Oren has been attempting to predict the likely responses of forest ecosystems, from the equator to the arctic circle, to environmental change and management.