Patrycja Pajewska

Profile

Project: Extreme heatwaves and responses in ecosystem climate gases

Summary: Few can have little doubt that our climate is warming and while the effects of drought, forest fires and extreme weather events are obvious, how key ecosystem services are being altered is less-well understood.

Here we seek to understand how the processes that make the potent greenhouse gas methane (CH4 gas is ~80 times more potent as climate gas than CO2 in the short-term) respond to extreme, short-term warming, like what the UK experienced this summer. While you might be broadly familiar with methanogenesis, the microbial process responsible for making methane, you might not appreciate that there are actually multiple variants with different sensitivities to warming.

Now we need to understand, whether or not those variants have the potential to respond rapidly to extremes of warming, to drive-up climate gas emissions, and b, whether there are differential responses among the variants – without a or b, it will be difficult to model future methane emissions.

In this project, I will be testing to see how how the key components of the methane cycle are affected by extreme warming events.

Supervisor:

• Prof Mark Trimmer

Research