Ranga Myneni

About

Ranga Myneni is a Professor at Boston University in the Department of Earth & Environment. He specializes in vegetation remote sensing with satellite data and climate-vegetation interactions, contributing to research in vegetation remote sensing and climate research. His educational background includes a Ph.D. from the University of Antwerp. He is involved in teaching courses such as Natural Environments: The Atmosphere, Physical Models in Remote Sensing, and Modeling and Monitoring Terrestrial Ecosystems Processes. His work focuses on understanding terrestrial ecosystems and their interactions with climate through remote sensing technologies.

Research topics

• Ecology
• Geology
• Geography
• Environmental science
• Biology
• Climatology
• Physical geography
• Atmospheric sciences
• Forestry
• Meteorology

Selected publications

• Summer soil drying exacerbated by earlier spring greening of northern vegetation

  Science Advances · 2020 · 478 citations

  Earlier vegetation greening under climate change raises evapotranspiration and thus lowers spring soil moisture, yet the extent and magnitude of this water deficit persistence into the following summer remain elusive. We provide observational evidence that increased foliage cover over the Northern Hemisphere, during 1982-2011, triggers an additional soil moisture deficit that is further carried over into summer. Climate model simulations independently support this and attribute the driving proce…

  DOI

• Spatial and temporal variations in global soil respiration and their relationships with climate and land cover

  Science Advances · 2020 · 207 citations

  changes.

  DOI

• Where Are Global Vegetation Greening and Browning Trends Significant?

  Geophysical Research Letters · 2021 · 148 citations

  Abstract Global greening trends have been widely reported based on long‐term remote sensing data of terrestrial ecosystems. Typically, a hypothesis test is performed for each grid cell; this leads to multiple hypothesis testing and false positive trend detection. We reanalyze global greening and account for this issue with a novel statistical method that allows robust inference on greening regions. Based on leaf area index (LAI) data, our methods reduce the detected greening from 35.2% to 15.3%…

  DOI

• Sub-continental-scale carbon stocks of individual trees in African drylands

  Nature · 2023 · 131 citations

  . We make available a linked database of wood mass, foliage mass, root mass and carbon stock of each tree for scientists, policymakers, dryland-restoration practitioners and farmers, who can use it to estimate farmland tree carbon stocks from tablets or laptops.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Climate-induced tree-mortality pulses are obscured by broad-scale and long-term greening

  Nature Ecology & Evolution · 2024-03-11 · 106 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Philippe Ciais

  Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement

  192 shared

• Yuri Knyazikhin

  183 shared

• Shilong Piao

  127 shared

• Ramakrishna Nemani

  94 shared

• Compton J. Tucker

  Goddard Space Flight Center

  76 shared

• Zaichun Zhu

  Ministry of Natural Resources

  75 shared

• Kai Yan

  72 shared

• Sangram Ganguly

  Ames Research Center

  71 shared

Labs

• Vegetation Remote Sensing & Climate ResearchPI

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of Antwerp

Similar researchers at Boston University

• Benjamin Sovacoolh-143
• Curtis E. Woodcockh-112
• Mark Friedlh-91