All the reasons I am jealous of terrestrial ecosystem scientists

All the reasons I am jealous of terrestrial ecosystem scientists

No matter where you work scaling ecosystem processes is challenging, but at least for terrestrial ecologists you can measure plants from space and they tend to stick around for a while. In rivers, our plants are tiny and our plant communities are frequently wiped out by floods or shaded by trees or sediments. We are just beginning to build strategies for scaling from simple models of algal growth to global scale estimates of river productivity. I will tell you how we are approaching this challenging problem and why it matters.