Jon Wang

Assistant Professor

Graduate Program Membership:

EEOB

Office/Building: Biol 210B
Email: jon.wang@utah.edu
Wang Lab: https://www.dycelab.net/

Research Statement

Climate change and human activity are rapidly transforming terrestrial ecosystems through disturbance processes like wildfire, timber harvest, urbanization, and drought. It is crucial to understand these changes as society increasingly relies on functioning landscapes for natural climate solutions. We use drones, satellite remote sensing, and data science to map changes in ecosystem structure and function and understand how plant ecology interacts with the carbon cycle. Specifically, we are interested in vulnerability to and recovery from natural and anthropogenic disturbance, carbon stocks and fluxes, phenology, and urban heat island. Our work focuses on hot-spots of change in vulnerable ecosystems, including boreal and Arctic ecosystems, fire-prone forests and shrublands, and urban landscapes. This collaborative, interdisciplinary work relies heavily on machine learning and high-performance computation to produce large datasets, which enables us to examine time series of ecosystem change at city-to-continent scales.

Research Interests

General Interests

Selected Publications

Wang, J. A., Randerson, J. T., Goulden, M. L., Knight, C. A., & Battles, J. J. (2022). Losses of tree cover in California driven by increasing fire disturbance and climate stress. AGU Advances, 3(4), e2021AV000654.
Wang, J. A., Baccini, A., Farina, M., Randerson, J. T., & Friedl, M. A. (2021). Disturbance suppresses the aboveground carbon sink in North American boreal forests. Nature Climate Change, 11(5), 435-441.
Wang, J. A., Sulla‐Menashe, D., Woodcock, C. E., Sonnentag, O., Keeling, R. F., & Friedl, M. A. (2020). Extensive land cover change across Arctic–Boreal Northwestern North America from disturbance and climate forcing. Global Change Biology, 26(2), 807-822.
Hardiman, B. S., Wang, J. A., Hutyra, L. R., Gately, C. K., Getson, J. M., & Friedl, M. A. (2017). Accounting for urban biogenic fluxes in regional carbon budgets. Science of the Total Environment, 592, 366-372.
Wang, J. A., Hutyra, L. R., Li, D., & Friedl, M. A. (2017). Gradients of atmospheric temperature and humidity controlled by local urban land-use intensity in Boston. Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, 56(4), 817-831.