Profile

I am a Junior Research Fellow in Tropical Forest Science in the Ecosystem Dynamics group within the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford. I majored in Environmental Science at University of California , Berkeley and subsequently completed a PhD in Earth System Science at University of California, Irvine. Before joining the ECI in July 2010, I spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution, Stanford.

My main interest is understanding tropical forest carbon fluxes, through remote sensing, eddy covariance, leaf gas exchange and intensive carbon cycle plots. I have several side interests including understanding when people first began to affect climate, the origin of agriculture, astrobiology, metabolic theory of ecology, and cooling regional climate using brighter crops.

Current Project

At the moment, as part of a large-scale RAINFOR research project, funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, I am coordinating research at 17 rainforest plots in 6 sites across the Amazon basin. At these plots, intensive monitoring of forest carbon cycling and allocation will: (1) Provide baseline estimates of current forest carbon storage, and (2) Track ongoing changes in forest carbon cycling. These results will help develop the next generation of coupled atmosphere-biosphere models and guide international climate policy.

Publications

• Doughty, C.E. (2011) An in situ leaf and branch level warming experiment in the Amazon. Biotropica.
• Y Malhi, C Doughty, D Galbraith (2011)The allocation of ecosystem net primary productivity in tropical forests Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366 2011
• Doughty, C.E. (2010) The development of agriculture in the Americas: an ecological perspective. Ecosphere.
• Doughty, C.E. and Field, C.B. (2010) Agricultural net primary production in relation to that liberated by the extinction of Pleistocene mega-herbivores: an estimate of agricultural carrying capacity? Environmental Research Letters, 5(4): 044001.
• Doughty, C.E., McMillan, A.M.S., and Field, C.B. (2010) Can crop albedo be increased through the modification of leaf trichomes, and could this cool regional climate? Climatic Change Letters, 104(2): 379-387.
• Doughty, C.E., Wolf, A., and Field, C.B. (2010) Biophysical feedbacks between the mega-fauna extinction and climate: the first human induced global warming? Geophysical Research Letters 37: L15703.
• Doughty, C.E., Asner, G.P. and Martin, R.E. (2010) Predicting tropical plant physiology from leaf and canopy spectroscopy. Oecologia, 165(2): 289-299.
• Doughty, C.E. and Wolf, A. (2010) Detecting tree-like multi-cellular life on extra-solar planets. Astrobiology, 10(9): 869-879.
• Doughty, C.E., Flanner, M.G. and Goulden, M.L. (2010) Effect of smoke on sub-canopy diffuse light, canopy temperature, and CO₂ uptake in an Amazon rainforest. Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 24: GB3015.
• Doughty, C.E. and Goulden, M.L. (2008) Seasonal patterns of tropical forest leaf area index and CO₂ exchange. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 113: G00B06.
• Doughty, C.E. and Goulden, M.L. (2008) Are tropical forests near a high temperature threshold? Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 113: G00B07.
• Doughty, C.E., Goulden, M.L., Miller, S.D. and da Rocha, H.R. (2006) Circadian rhythms constrain leaf and canopy gas exchange in an Amazonian forest. Geophysical Research Letters, 33(15): L15404.