Eric A. Davidson (University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, Appalachian Laboratory; Spark Climate)
Minding Our p’s and q’s: How NPP and Climate Affect the Q10 of Heterotrophic Respiration

Eric Davidson is a biogeochemist with research including the exchange of plant nutrients from the land to streams and groundwater and the exchange of greenhouse gases between the soil and the atmosphere. He works in a variety of ecosystems, including forests and agricultural lands in North and South America. He previously served as Director at the Appalachian Laboratory and as President and Executive Director at the Woods Hole Research Center. Davidson is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Past-President of the American Geophysical Union. He has authored multiple books, including Science for a Green New Deal: Connecting Climate, Economics, and Social Justice, and currently serves as Principal Scientist at Spark Climate Solutions.

César Terrer (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Missing Links of the Land Sink: How Soils, Microbes, and Birds Shape the Carbon Cycle

César Terrer is a climate ecologist whose work centers on the terrestrial carbon cycle. He investigates how plant–soil carbon pools and processes respond to rising CO2 and climate change and develops evidence-based strategies to increase land carbon storage as nature-based climate solutions. Through meta-analyses, field syntheses, and modeling, he has shown that plant–microbe symbioses are first-order controls on global carbon uptake. Current work targets major uncertainties in tropical carbon budgets: decadal soil organic carbon trends; CO2 effects in tropical forests in a volcanic natural CO2 experiment; biomass and soil responses to convective windthrow in Amazonia; consequences of animal seed-dispersal loss for forest regrowth; and the sensitivity of tropical carbon stocks to extreme droughts.

Chonggang Xu (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
The MODEX Framework for Vegetation Modeling in the World of AI

Chonggang Xu is a forest ecologist with >20 years with experience in modeling ecosystem dynamics, vegetation changes, and insect population dynamics.  He recevied his PhD in Modeling and Quantitative Analysis in Environmental science from University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign in 2009.  He has very diverse experience of development, parameter estimation, and uncertainty quantification for many different models including FATES for vegetation dynamics,  FATES-HYDRO for plant water transportation, LUNA for environment-dependent photosynthesis, IMAP for beetle phenology and mortality, SKEETER-BUSTER and CIMMID for mosquito-disease modeling, and the Community Land surface Model (CLM) for land carbon, water and nutrient cycles at the global scales. He has extensive leadership in scientific project management, having led 17 research projects totaling approximately $15 million in funding, and mentored 19 postdoctoral researchers and 11 graduate students.