James Randerson

Chancellor's Professor Earth System Science UC Irvine

  • Irvine CA

James Randerson studies the global carbon cycle using remote sensing and in-situ measurements and different types of models.

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Biography

Randerson studies the global carbon cycle using remote sensing and in-situ measurements and different types of models. Current research themes in his laboratory include climate-carbon cycle feedbacks, land use change, and the effects of fire on ecosystem function and atmospheric composition. He has conducted field work in Alaska and Siberia to assess the long-term impacts of fire on surface energy exchange and fluxes of carbon dioxide. In 2005 Randerson was the recipient of the James B. Macelwane Medal awarded by the American Geophysical Union for "significant contributions to the geophysical sciences by an outstanding young scientist." He received a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences (1998) and a B.S. in Chemistry (1992) from Stanford University. He conducted work as a postdoctoral scholar at University of California, Berkeley and University of Alaska. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Areas of Expertise

Climate-Carbon Cycle Feedbacks
Forests
Wildfires
Climate
Plants

Accomplishments

Piers J. Sellers Global Environmental Change Mid-Career Award

2017

American Geophysical Union

NASA Group Achievement Award

2014

Education

Stanford University

PhD

Biological Sciences

1998

Stanford University

BS

Chemistry

1992

Affiliations

  • American Geophysical Union : Fellow
  • Ecological Society of America
  • American Association for the Advancement of Science
  • National Academy of Sciences of the United States

Media Appearances

California Wildfires Have Become More Severe, Killing More Trees, UC Irvine Researchers Find - More State Forests Are Vulnerable to Wildfire Due to Climate Change

Sierra Sun Times  online

2024-11-24

“As California’s climate has become warmer and drier, the severity of the average wildfire increased by 30 percent between the 1980s and 2010s,” said Jon Wang, a professor at the University of Utah and former postdoctoral researcher in the UC Irvine Department of Earth System Science. … “When fire moves over a forest’s floor, often the tree canopy will survive and, in some situations, thrive from fire effects on nutrient cycling,” said study co-author James Randerson, professor in the UC Irvine Department of Earth System Science.

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As climate warms, California wildfires are becoming more sever, killing more trees

Physical.org  online

2024-11-15

"When fire moves through an area on the forest floor, often mature trees survive and, in some situations, they may thrive from fire effects on nutrient cycling," said study co-author James Randerson, professor in the UC Irvine Department of Earth System Science. "The new research suggests more fire is jumping into the tree crowns, causing more damage and tree mortality."

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Fact Check-Viral video of satellite images is not evidence that Quebec fires were orchestrated attacks

Reuters  online

2023-06-13

James Randerson, [Chancellor’s] Professor of Earth System Science at UC Irvine, said in an email to Reuters that the development of the fires is not unexpected “when we have sustained periods of hot and dry weather” and added that such fires “do not appear instantaneously.” By the morning of June 2, SOPFEU reported there were already 114 active wildfires in Quebec (here), of which a large proportion were caused by lightning that struck on June 1. It said more were to be expected on June 2.

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Articles

Machine learning to predict final fire size at the time of ignition

International Journal of Wildland Fire

Shane R Coffield, Casey A Graff, Yang Chen, Padhraic Smyth, Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, James T Randerson

2019

Fires in boreal forests of Alaska are changing, threatening human health and ecosystems. Given expected increases in fire activity with climate warming, insight into the controls on fire size from the time of ignition is necessary. Such insight may be increasingly useful for fire management, especially in cases where many ignitions occur in a short time period. Here we investigated the controls and predictability of final fire size at the time of ignition. Using decision trees, we show that ignitions can be classified as leading to small, medium or large fires with 50.4 ± 5.2% accuracy.

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The effect of plant physiological responses to rising CO2 on global streamflow

Nature Climate Change

Megan D. Fowler, Gabriel J. Kooperman, James T. Randerson & Michael S. Pritchard

2019

River flow statistics are expected to change as a result of increasing atmospheric CO2 but uncertainty in Earth system model projections is high. While this is partly driven by changing precipitation, with well-known Earth system model uncertainties, here we show that the influence of plant stomatal conductance feedbacks can cause equally large changes in regional flood extremes and even act as the main control on future low latitude streamflow.

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The Community Land Model Version 5: Description of New Features, Benchmarking, and Impact of Forcing Uncertainty

Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems

David M Lawrence, Rosie A Fisher, Charles D Koven, Keith W Oleson, Sean C Swenson, Gordon Bonan, Nathan Collier, Bardan Ghimire, Leo van Kampenhout, Daniel Kennedy, Erik Kluzek, Peter J Lawrence, Fang Li, Hongyi Li, Danica Lombardozzi, William J Riley, William J Sacks, Mingjie Shi, Mariana Vertenstein, William R Wieder, Chonggang Xu, Ashehad A Ali, Andrew M Badger, Gautam Bisht, Michiel van den Broeke, Michael A Brunke, Sean P Burns, Jonathan Buzan, Martyn Clark, Anthony Craig, Kyla Dahlin, Beth Drewniak, Joshua B Fisher, Mark Flanner, Andrew M Fox, Pierre Gentine, Forrest Hoffman, Gretchen Keppel‐Aleks, Ryan Knox, Sanjiv Kumar, Jan Lenaerts, L Ruby Leung, William H Lipscomb, Yaqiong Lu, Ashutosh Pandey, Jon D Pelletier, Justin Perket, James T Randerson, Daniel M Ricciuto, Benjamin M Sanderson, Andrew Slater, Zachary M Subin, Jinyun Tang, R Quinn Thomas, Maria Val Martin, Xubin Zeng

2019

The Community Land Model (CLM) is the land component of the Community Earth System Model (CESM) and is used in several global and regional modeling systems. In this paper, we introduce model developments included in CLM version 5 (CLM5), which is the default land component for CESM2.

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