Paul R Moorcroft

About

Paul R Moorcroft is a Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and an Affiliate in Environmental Science & Engineering. His primary teaching areas include Environmental Science & Engineering. His research focuses on environmental science and engineering, specifically biogeochemical cycles, climate change, and water. He is associated with the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, located at 150 Western Ave, Allston, MA, and also has a presence at 29 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA. His work involves understanding complex environmental systems and their interactions, contributing to the fields of climate change and water resource management.

Research topics

• Ecology
• Environmental science
• Geography
• Computer Science
• Atmospheric sciences
• Agronomy
• Agroforestry
• Economics
• Botany
• Biology

Selected publications

• Impacts of Degradation on Water, Energy, and Carbon Cycling of the Amazon Tropical Forests

  Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences · 2020 · 104 citations

  Selective logging, fragmentation, and understory fires directly degrade forest structure and composition. However, studies addressing the effects of forest degradation on carbon, water, and energy cycles are scarce. Here, we integrate field observations and high-resolution remote sensing from airborne lidar to provide realistic initial conditions to the Ecosystem Demography Model (ED-2.2) and investigate how disturbances from forest degradation affect gross primary production (GPP), evapotranspi…

  DOI

• Impacts of climate change and deforestation on hydropower planning in the Brazilian Amazon

  Nature Sustainability · 2020 · 85 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Leaf surface water, not plant water stress, drives diurnal variation in tropical forest canopy water content

  New Phytologist · 2021 · 83 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  to CWC variation, however, decreases at longer, seasonal to inter-annual, time scales. Our results demonstrate that diurnal patterns of dew formation and rainfall interception can be an important driver of diurnal variation in CWC and VOD over tropical ecosystems and therefore should be accounted for when inferring plant diurnal water stress from VOD measurements.

  DOI

• Memory drives the formation of animal home ranges: Evidence from a reintroduction

  Ecology Letters · 2022-01-31 · 59 citations

  letterOpen accessSenior author

  Most animals live in home ranges, and memory is thought to be an important process in their formation. However, a general memory-based model for characterising and predicting home range emergence has been lacking. Here, we use a mechanistic movement model to: (1) quantify the role of memory in the movements of a large mammal reintroduced into a novel environment, and (2) predict observed patterns of home range emergence in this experimental setting. We show that an interplay between memory and r…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Remote Sensing‐Based Forest Modeling Reveals Positive Effects of Functional Diversity on Productivity at Local Spatial Scale

  Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences · 2023-05-08 · 17 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Forest biodiversity is critical for many ecosystem functions and services. Yet, it remains uncertain how plant functional diversity influences ecosystem functioning across environmental gradients and contiguous larger areas. We integrated remote sensing and terrestrial biosphere modeling to explore functional diversity–productivity relationships at multiple spatial scales for a heterogeneous forest ecosystem in Switzerland. We initialized forest structure and composition in the ecosyste…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Determining the drought sensitivity of the Amazon forest

  NSF · $15k · 2011–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Marcos Longo

  Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation

  81 shared

• Eunjee Lee

  54 shared

• Mauricio E. Arias

  University of South Florida

  49 shared

• Fábio Farias Pereira

  Universidade Federal de Alagoas

  42 shared

• John Briscoe

  41 shared

• Fabio Farinosi

  35 shared

• G. C. Hurtt

  University of Maryland, College Park

  33 shared

• R. G. Knox

  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

  33 shared

Similar researchers at Harvard University

• Daniel P. Schragh-109
• Daniel Jacobh-108
• Jerry X. Mitrovicah-107