Trevor Keenan

About

Trevor Keenan is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on understanding the response of terrestrial ecosystems to climate variability and long-term change, with particular attention to ecosystem carbon cycling and water use, and their feedbacks to the atmosphere. His work combines large ecological data sets, such as eddy-covariance and remote sensing data, with models of ecosystem state and function, utilizing data assimilation and mining tools. He integrates results from in-situ field studies and experiments to develop a mechanistic understanding of key physical and biological processes. Keenan employs methods from diverse disciplines including ecophysiology, biogeochemistry, micrometeorology, atmospheric science, mathematics, statistics, and high-performance computing. He earned his Ph.D. in Earth System Science from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2009, a Master of Research in Mathematics in the Living Environment from the University of York in 2006, and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Dublin City University in 2002.

Research topics

• Geography
• Environmental science
• Geology
• Meteorology
• Ecology
• Archaeology
• Agronomy
• Atmospheric sciences
• Earth science
• Climatology

Selected publications

• Integrating the evidence for a terrestrial carbon sink caused by increasing atmospheric CO ₂

  New Phytologist · 2020 · 647 citations

  , albeit with uncertain magnitude and strong suggestion of a role for additional agents of global change.

  DOI

• A trade-off between plant and soil carbon storage under elevated CO2

  Nature · 2021 · 646 citations

  DOI

• Soil moisture–atmosphere feedbacks mitigate declining water availability in drylands

  Nature Climate Change · 2021 · 343 citations

  PublisherDOI

• Prithvi-EO-2.0: A Versatile Multitemporal Foundation Model for Earth Observation Applications

  IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing · 2025-12-11 · 21 citations

  articleOpen access

  This paper presents Prithvi-EO-2.0, a new geospatial foundation model that offers significant improvements over its predecessor, Prithvi-EO-1.0. Trained on 4.2 million global time series samples from NASA’s Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 data archive at 30-m resolution, the new model incorporates temporal and location embeddings for enhanced performance across various geospatial tasks. Through extensive benchmarking with GEO-Bench, the model outperforms the previous Prithvi-EO model by 8% acr…

  PublisherDOI

• Global variation in vegetation carbon use efficiency inferred from eddy covariance observations

  Nature Ecology & Evolution · 2025-06-19 · 17 citations

  articleOpen access

  Terrestrial ecosystems have been serving as a strong carbon sink that offsets one-quarter of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Carbon use efficiency (CUE), the percentage of photosynthesized carbon that is available for biomass production and other secondary carbon products, is one factor determining the carbon sink size. The global variation in CUE remains unclear, however, as recent reports disagree over the responses of CUE to temperature, dryness, forest types and stand age, and there are limited…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• PREEVENTS Track 2: Collaborative Research: Flash droughts: process, prediction, and the central role of vegetation in their evolution.

  NSF · $305k · 2019–2024

Frequent coauthors

• I. Colin Prentice

  138 shared

• Xiangzhong Luo

  National University of Singapore

  98 shared

• Santiago Sabaté

  Centre for Research on Ecology and Forestry Applications

  65 shared

• Benjamin D. Stocker

  University of Bern

  56 shared

• Nicholas G. Smith

  Texas Tech University

  53 shared

• Carlos Gracia

  47 shared

• Andrew D. Richardson

  Northern Arizona University

  46 shared

• Xinchen Lu

  45 shared

Education

• PhD, CREAF

  Autonomous University of Barcelona

  2009

• MRes, Biology

  University of York

  2005

• BSc, Mathematics

  Dublin City University

  2002

Similar researchers at University of California, Berkeley

• Allen Goldsteinh-129
• Todd Dawsonh-100
• Whendee Silverh-80