Reporter Topic: Ecosystem water use efficiency: history, applications and issues

Reporter: Professor Ying-Ping Wang

Time: 10:00, Apr.4, 2023

Location: Room 328, Academic Hall of State Key Laboratory

Brief Introduction of Professor Ying-Ping Wang

Professor Ying-Ping Wang is a chief research scientist in CSIRO, an adjunct professor of the University of New South Wales, a chief editor of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology and an associate editor of Global Biogeochemical Cycles. He leads the development of the Australian community land surface model (CABLE) that has become a key component of the Australian earth system model. He has published over 220 papers, including 27 papers in Science, PNAS, Nature and Nature family journals, and 12 book chapters. He is a Clarivate highly cited researcher in cross field since 2018-2022 with a Hirsch index of 71. His research interests include land-based climate mitigation, global land modelling, global biogeochemical cycles, land use change, nutrient limitation, model-data fusion and model benchmarking.

Brief Introduction of the report

Prof. Wang will briefly describe the history of the concept of water use efficiency (WUE), and how the water use efficiency was used to help crop scientists and terrestrial ecologists to unravel various feedbacks between water and carbon cycles. He will also go through the theoretical development since 1980’s, and application of a simple theoretical framework of water use efficiency in quantifying the spatial variation of water use efficiency. Finally, he will discuss some issues in using or abusing water use efficiency in the literature.