About

Debjani Sihi is an Assistant Professor affiliated with the Department of Plant & Microbial Biology and Crop & Soil Sciences at NC State University, having joined the CALS AI cluster in the fall of 2024. She is a biogeochemist whose research program focuses on the plant-soil-microbe-atmosphere continuum, integrating field and laboratory data with machine learning (AI) and process-based (mechanistic) models. Her specialization lies in soil and ecosystem carbon and nutrient cycle processes, as well as greenhouse gas emissions from managed agricultural and natural ecosystems such as forests, wetlands, and grasslands. Her work aims to leverage cutting-edge technologies, including sensors, imaging, and molecular technologies, to address grand challenges related to climate change, food security, and environmental sustainability through multi-scale modeling and big data analytics. Her research projects are funded by federal agencies like USDA, NSF, DOE, and industry partners such as Valent Biosciences. Sihi has a background that includes doctoral research at the University of Florida and postdoctoral appointments at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Her contributions are centered on understanding and predicting biogeochemical processes and greenhouse gas fluxes in various ecosystems.

Research topics

• Environmental science
• Business
• Computer Science
• Ecology
• World Wide Web
• Chemistry
• Geography
• Forestry
• Environmental planning
• Medicine
• Environmental resource management
• Environmental protection
• Economics
• Environmental health
• Biology
• Soil science
• Natural resource economics
• Geology
• Database
• Atmospheric sciences

Selected publications

• Lowland tropical forests remain a methane sink under warming and long-term hurricane disturbance recovery

  Agricultural and Forest Meteorology · 2026-05-23 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Methane (CH 4 ) is a potent greenhouse gas, and tropical forests account for roughly one–third of global atmospheric CH 4 uptake by soils. Projected warming and more frequent hurricanes in these ecosystems may alter soil CH 4 sink strength, as warmer and wetter soils enhance methanogenesis activity. We measured soil CH 4 and CO 2 efflux during the calendar summer months of 2023 and 2024 alongside continuous records of soil moisture, soil and air temperature, and precipitation in an in–situ warming experiment (TRACE) located in a lowland tropical forest in Puerto Rico, six to seven years after Hurricanes Irma and Maria (2017). The realized warming (∼1.95°C) enhanced soil respiration only in summer 2023 ( p < 0.05), but net soil CH 4 uptake was invariant in both campaigns ( p > 0.05). Instead, sampling day and between–plot variability explained soil CH 4 dynamics much more than treatment contrasts. Importantly, CH 4 uptake was consistently coupled to CO 2 efflux, suggesting tight linkages between methanotrophic and heterotrophic activities. Between treatments, CH 4 and CO 2 responses to soil temperature variation were less sensitive in warmed plots, which may suggest weak metabolic upregulation under elevated temperatures. Together, these findings indicate that lowland tropical soils remain CH 4 sink even under warming and years after hurricane disturbance, with CH 4 dynamics driven more by spatial and temporal variability than experimental warming. Long–term, high–resolution monitoring integrating soil biogeochemistry and microbial processes will be critical to determine whether the observed net CH 4 uptake signal represents a sustainable or transient response under continued warming and disturbance.

  PublisherDOI

• Data for EMSL Project 60398 from October 2024

  DOE Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) Repository · 2026-05-02

  datasetOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Data for EMSL Project 60398 from October 2024

  DOE Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) Repository · 2026-05-02

  datasetOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Data for EMSL Project 60398 from October 2024

  DOE Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) Repository · 2026-05-02

  datasetOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Data for EMSL Project 60398 from October 2024

  DOE Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) Repository · 2026-05-02

  datasetOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Data for EMSL Project 60398 from October 2024

  DOE Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) Repository · 2026-05-02

  datasetOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Data for EMSL Project 60398 from October 2024

  DOE Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) Repository · 2026-05-02

  datasetOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Data for EMSL Project 60398 from October 2024

  DOE Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) Repository · 2026-05-02

  datasetOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Data for EMSL Project 60398 from October 2024

  DOE Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) Repository · 2026-05-02

  datasetOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Data for EMSL Project 60398 from October 2024

  DOE Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) Repository · 2026-05-02

  datasetOpen access
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: MSA: Upscaling soil organic carbon measurements at the continental scale: Evaluating emergent ecosystem properties using multivariate quantitative methods

  NSF · $253k · 2021–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Melanie A. Mayes

  Oak Ridge National Laboratory

  94 shared

• C. López-Lloreda

  93 shared

• Christine S. O’Connell

  Macalester College

  92 shared

• Ryan K. Quinn

  89 shared

• Whendee L. Silver

  University of California, Berkeley

  89 shared

• Jana R. Phillips

  Oak Ridge National Laboratory

  88 shared

• Julia Brenner

  Oak Ridge National Laboratory

  88 shared

• Brent D. Newman

  86 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Plant Biology

  University of California, Berkeley

  2009

• M.S., Plant Biology

  University of California, Berkeley

  2005

• B.S., Botany

  University of California, Davis

  2003