Ecosystem Function in Savannas

Michael J. Hill received his PhD from the University of Sydney, Australia, in 1985. He spent 12 years in the CSIRO Division of Animal Production and then 6 years in the Bureau of Rural Sciences in the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Forestry of the Australian Government, where he carried out research in and contributed to the management of the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Accounting. In 2006, he became a professor of earth systems science in the Department of Earth Systems Science and Policy at the University of North Dakota. He has a background in grassland agronomy, but he has been working with spatial information and remote sensing of land systems for the past 17 years.

Dr. Hill has published widely on agronomy, ecology, biogeography, and production of grasslands, and radar, multispectral, and hyperspectral remote sensing of grasslands, and more recently he has been involved in the development of scenario analysis models for assessment of carbon dynamics in Australian rangeland and savanna systems. His current interests are in the use of MODIS land product data in model-data assimilation, application of quantitative information from hyperspectral and multiangle imaging to vegetation description, multicriteria and decision frameworks for coupled human-environment systems, and methods and approaches to application of spatial data for land use management.

Niall P. Hanan received his PhD from the University of London in 1990. Since 1998, he has been a research scientist in the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University. His research interests include savanna ecology function and dynamics; biosphere-atmosphere interactions and global change; ecophysiology of carbon, water, and energy exchange between plants and atmosphere; and radiative and aerodynamic transfer in vegetation canopies.

Dr. Hanan's current research centers on the ecology of semiarid grassland and savanna systems in Africa and North America. Ongoing projects include research into the ecological determinants and dynamics of tree-grass interactions and coexistence in African savannas; the measurement of biosphere-atmosphere exchange of water and carbon and the implications for competitive interactions and productivity in savannas; impact of land use change in semiarid systems on long-term carbon and water dynamics; and the greenhouse gas implications of cattle and intensive cattle production systems. In 2007, he spent a year as a U.S. Department of State Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bamako and the Institut Polytechnique Rural in Mali.