Dr. Meghan Salmon-Tumas

Dr. Meghan Salmon-Tumas is land change scientist investigating how the timing and nature of plant growth respond to climate and climate change across geographic settings. The timing of recurring events in nature, or phenology, is critical for ecosystem functioning; at the landscape scale, changes in growing season timing and duration affect hydrometeorological conditions and biogeochemical cycles, such as carbon fluxes. Salmon-Tumas’s work seeks to understand when, where, and why growing season changes are occurring in Northwoods forests, and what the changes mean for forest ecosystems.

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Salmon-Tumas studies forest phenology by integrating measurements across scales, from individual plants up to the landscape and beyond. She is currently developing methods for tracking phenology from trail camera networks, and integrating these observations with those from field studies, tower-mounted cameras, and satellite remote sensing. This synthesis builds up a complex understanding of forest changes in response to climate change, from the forest floor to the canopy.

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Salmon-Tumas is particularly interested in the biophysical processes through which land cover and surface climate interact. These fluxes of energy and moisture influence weather and climate as well as ecosystem properties. During her five years as an Assistant Professor of Climate Science at Northland College, she developed an undergraduate course on Land-Atmosphere Interactions, in which students utilized a diversity of field measurements to explore these fluxes across geographic settings and seasons. 

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Salmon-Tumas’s research integrates remote sensing with data from models, surveys, and the field to examine interactions between land cover, climate, and human activities. During her postdoctoral position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she worked with a team in the Global Land Use and Environment Lab to map recent cropland conversion in the U.S. driven by the economic effects of the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). Finding that this land change threatened the emissions-reduction goals of the policy, she worked with co-authors to publish recommendations to improve RFS enforcement as well as increasing coverage of the sodsaver provision in the U.S. Farm Bill. Her previous work also includes global-scale mapping of crop irrigation patterns and near real-time monitoring of wildland fires for air quality predictions.