Anna Trugman

Biography

Anna grew up in the southern Rocky Mountains in Northern New Mexico. She received a BS from Stanford University in Geological and Environmental Sciences, a Ph.D. from Princeton University in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and was a USDA NIFA Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Utah. Anna has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at UCSB since 2019. Professor Trugman’s research focuses on how changes in climate and water availability affect ecosystem diversity, productivity, and resilience across large spatial scales.

Research

Terrestrial ecosystems sequester a substantial amount of human CO2 emissions through photosynthesis. However, it is unclear whether ecosystems will increase or decrease CO2 drawdown with global climate change. This uncertainty is associated with both the physical processes of climate change, such as increased temperature and changes in water availability, and also the biological responses and adaptations to changes in climate and increased atmospheric CO2. My research uses numerical ecosystem models, constrained with observational data, to distill important biological mechanisms that impact ecosystem CO2 drawdown at broad spatial scales.