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Ecology Professor Honored for Research |
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Vicki L. Kroll |
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May 5, 2004 |
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| Dr. Jiquan Chen |
Dr. Jiquan Chen, UT professor of earth, ecological and environmental sciences, recently received the Sigma Xi/Dion D. Raftopoulos Award for Outstanding Research.
He received a plaque and a check for $1,500 at the Sigma Xi annual banquet on April 23.
“Dr. Chen’s research and scholarship are at the cutting edge of landscape ecology and ecosystem science,” wrote a nominator. “In the past 10 years, Dr. Chen has received funding for 48 projects, totaling $8 million from the National Science Foundation, the Joint Fire Science Program, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, the state of Missouri, the Department of Energy and others.”
Chen’s research focuses on landscape and community ecology, ecosystem analysis, and ecological modeling. Last fall, he and his team in the Landscape Ecology and Ecosystem Science Lab installed a tower in the Oak Openings region as part of a global effort to find out how forests impact global warming.
“The data we collect from the Oak Openings site will give us a better idea of how much carbon our area puts into or pulls out of the atmosphere,” Chen said. “By better management of our forests, we can help slow down the global warming and assist policy-makers calculate carbon credits.”
Chen also is working with researchers from five Chinese universities to set up similar research projects in China’s forests, which he said are different from U.S. forests. “Forest cover in China is extremely low and disturbed more often than ours. However, the climate in eastern China is similar to the climate in the eastern United States,” Chen said. “I want to determine what kind of impact these factors have on the amount of carbon that is sequestered by different forests.”
“Dr. Chen’s research has been influential since his graduate school days at the University of Washington. The Forest Ecosystem Management and Analysis Team, a group established by the Clinton/Gore administration and known as the ‘Forest Summit,’ directly applied results from his dissertation research in the early 1990s in establishing forest management guidelines,” a nominator wrote. “His research products and ongoing efforts will greatly enhance UT’s standards and bring our influences to the international radar screen.”
Chen joined the UT faculty in 2001 as an associate professor and was promoted to professor and received tenure in 2003. He and Dr. Quan Dong, an ecologist with the South Florida Natural Resource Center, published a book in China in 2002 titled Nature’s Giving Ecology of Ecosystems and Landscapes. A second edition of the book was printed last week. Chen is a co-author on a forthcoming book, Premiers in Landscape Ecology. He is an associate editor of Forest Science and serves on the editorial board of Acta Ecological Sinica and Acta Applied Ecologia.
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