Pamela Templer Elected as an Ecological Society of America Fellow

Pamela Templer, a Professor in the Department of Biology and a Faculty Research Fellow at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, was recently elected as a 2019 Ecological Society of America (ESA) Fellow.

The ESA fellows program was established in 2012 to recognize members who have made outstanding contributions to ecological knowledge in academics, government, non-profit organizations, and broader society. Fellows are elected for life.

Prof. Templer was elected for “advancing understanding of the effects of climate change on biogeochemical cycles in forests, the patterns and mechanisms of nitrogen retention and loss in temperate and tropical forest ecosystems, and the effects of urbanization on air and water pollution, nutrient cycling, and carbon sequestration.”

As a Pardee Center Faculty Research Fellow, Prof. Templer and Prof. Lucy Hutyra lead a project that established the first urban nitrogen monitoring stations in Boston (on the BU campus and throughout the City of Boston) as part of the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP). This urban monitoring network complements the larger biogeochemistry research program at BU, which is seeking to understand the sources and transformations of emissions and deposition of nitrogen in Boston in order to make predictions about future atmospheric nitrogen deposition rates.

She also leads a Pardee Center project with Prof. Hutyra and Prof. Dan Li exploring the mitigation of Boston’s heat island effect by increasing urban canopy. The project will quantify transpiration rates in both urban and nearby rural trees, integrate those rates into urban heat island models, and use the findings to test the efficiency of urban canopy mitigation approaches.