(He/Him)
🎙 Tell us about yourself?
I’m originally from Guyana, a tropical South American / Caribbean country. I’ve been immensely privileged to have worked in a wide range of natural environments, including Guyana’s lush rainforests and savannahs, and Canada’s idyllic temperate forests. Some of the initiatives I’ve been involved in include biodiversity surveys (including plants, birds, herpetofauna, mammals and insects) and community conservation projects with Guyana’s Macushi and Wapisiana (Indigenous) peoples. I completed my undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of Guyana and moved to Scarborough in 2016 to start my Master of Environmental Science degree at UTSC (Climate Change Impact Assessment Specialization) and now I’m reading for my PhD in Environmental Science.
🎙 What are your research interests & what are you currently researching?
My research interests include forest carbon dynamics and ecology, and these are the general areas I am investigating for my Ph.D. Specifically, I’m trying to develop a better understanding of how tree and wood functional traits (especially carbon concentrations/fractions) govern forest biogeochemical cycles (namely forest carbon cycles), in managed and unmanaged forest ecosystems. This involves improving our estimates of wood carbon fractions (often generically given as 50% of unit dry mass) - which are usually applied to spatially-explicit estimates of forest biomass- to estimate forest carbon stocks and fluxes. Thus far, I’ve compiled a large database of wood carbon fractions (>3,600 observations) called "GLOWCAD", which I intend to use to reassess forest carbon stocks around the globe, beginning with the USA, through a collaboration with the USDA Forest Service. Additionally, I’ve been exploring ways of improving the accuracy of wood carbon fraction estimates in deadwood – an often-neglected aboveground biomass and carbon pool - by factoring in the role of volatile organic compounds in wood carbon estimation methods.
🎙 What is the significance of your current research?
From a pure science perspective, my research will significantly improve our understanding of variation in wood chemical traits, and how this variation governs forest biogeochemical cycles (namely, forest carbon cycling). From an applied perspective, my research provides critical knowledge on linkages between species composition and biogeochemistry, which will in turn improve global forest carbon and nutrient budget models. For example, my work will have immediate relevance for refining the IPCC’s National Greenhouse Inventory Guidelines, and for parameterizing important forest carbon models such as the Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sector.
🎙 Any interesting insights/results so far related to your research?
Yes! So far, we’ve found that the use of generic carbon fractions (e.g., 50%) results in non-trivial errors in forest carbon stock estimates – usually 4.8% on average. In the case of tropical angiosperm-dominated forests, this error can lead to forest carbon overestimates of as much as 8.9%! This finding has major implications for global forest carbon stock estimates, especially considering the importance of tropical forests in sequestering and storing atmospheric carbon. From a methodological perspective, we’ve found that conventional laboratory methods for measuring wood carbon fractions are also prone to inaccuracies since volatile carbon compounds are lost, and ultimately unaccounted for, during sample preparation. This finding, which is certainly true for live wood carbon fractions, is also turning out to be true for deadwood carbon fractions, and its investigation will form a substantive component of my Ph.D. dissertation.
🎙 What aspirations do you have for your research? How do you see it being utilized?
I would like to see our refined wood carbon fractions being integrated into popular forest carbon accounting protocols, like the IPCC’s National Greenhouse Inventory Guidelines and the Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sector. This will go a long way in ensuring that forest carbon estimates are based on the most up-to-date scientific knowledge related to wood carbon fractions.