Member Since 1990
Dennis D. Baldocchi
Distinguished Professor and Executive Associate Dean, University of California Berkeley
Baldocchi is a Distinguished Professor of Biometeorology and Executive Associate Dean in the College of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on measuring and modeling water, carbon dioxide and methane exchange of ecosystems. He is an AGU and AMS Fellow, recipient of the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Surface Water, the Suomi Technology medal of the AMS, AGU Ambassador Award and Doctor Honoris Causa from Wageningen University.
Professional Experience
University of California Berkeley
Distinguished Professor and Executive Associate Dean
1999 - Present
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Physical Scientist
1986 - 1999
Education
Doctorate
1982
University of California Davis, Land, Air, and Water Resources
Bachelors
1977
University of California Davis
Bachelors
1977
University of Nebraska Lincoln
Doctorate
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Honors & Awards
Ambassador Award
Received December 2024
Citation
Professor Dennis Baldocchi is the quintessential biogeoscientist, with a stellar record of productive scholarly collaborations with scientists from around the world and unmatched mentoring of early-career scientists. He is a leader in running flux tower networks, serving as the science component leader and a member of science steering committees. He has forged productive collaborations among atmospheric scientists and ecologists, emphasizing positive mentoring and professional development for junior scholars. He has been the perennial mentor and keynote speaker for national and international workshops organized to train future professionals in flux tower studies, skillfully steering and inspiring generations of junior scientists. Throughout his career, he has sustained effective mentoring strategies with the view that the scientific community needs to rely on competent scientists from all cultural backgrounds. Baldocchi has commendably served the scientific community and national and international science advisory boards, including federal government funding agencies. He has been the editor of many journals, including the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, serving as its editor-in-chief.Baldocchi has been a transformative scholar. He conducted the first studies that merged rigorous plant physiological theory with atmospheric turbulence to provide early estimates of seasonal ecosystem-level assimilation of carbon dioxide. He launched research to demonstrate that in forested ecosystems, vertical canopy architecture and the surrounding microclimate are of paramount importance in estimating net carbon ecosystem exchange. His most creative thematic work involves extracting various timescale information about ecological processes from long-term flux monitoring records and exploring the interplay between ecosystem structure and function. Baldocchi pioneered the now-popular eddy covariance methods to estimate trace gas exchanges at the biosphere-atmosphere interface continuously for periods lasting years. Thanks to these innovations, scientists worldwide now pursue studies to understand how ecosystems respond to and mitigate climate change. Using data from flux tower sites globally, his research has been applied to project future carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. His scholarly work has enabled the solution of contemporary societal problems, such as providing baseline information on the role of terrestrial ecosystems in mitigating anthropogenic carbon emissions, thereby contributing to scientific and policy objectives.Overall, Baldocchi is an influential scholar in biogeosciences, unraveling the structural and functional complexities of plant ecosystems, explaining how energy and trace gas fluxes vary across a spectrum of temporal and spatial scales, and tirelessly promoting greater and more productive collaborations within and between the atmospheric science and ecology communities.—Jose D. Fuentes Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pennsylvania
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Union Fellow
Received January 2007
AGU Abstracts
Trends in Carbon and Water Fluxes Across AmeriFlux: Insights from Eddy Covariance Measurements
AGU 2024
biogeosciences | 13 december 2024
Koong Yi, Arman Ahmadi, Margaret S. Torn, Dennis D...
Over the past few decades, eddy covariance networks have experienced substantial growth. Since the establishment of regional and global networks in th...
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Understanding the Role of Water Availability in Regulating Thermal Optimality and Ecosystem Productivity Using Interpretable Machine Learning
AGU 2024
biogeosciences | 13 december 2024
Arman Ahmadi, Kaniska Mallick, Koong Yi, Dennis D....
Ecosystem productivity, driven by photosynthesis, significantly contributes to global carbon sequestration. Air temperature directly affects the leaf-...
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Periodicity in Methane Emissions from a Restored Freshwater Wetland
AGU 2024
biogeosciences | 12 december 2024
Robert Shortt, Dennis D. Baldocchi, Joseph G. Verf...
Methane emissions vary widely across space and time in terrestrial freshwater ecosystems. Because of this, and because of the limited data available t...
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Volunteer Experience
2018 - 2020
Member
Union Fellows Committee
2017 - 2017
Member
Union Fellows Committee
2009 - 2014
Editor
JGR Biogeosciences Section