Charlie Koven, pictured above, develops numerical models of soil, vegetation, and atmospheric processes to understand how terrestrial ecosystems respond to climate change.
EESA Staff Scientist Charlie Koven has been selected to receive the 2021 Piers J. Sellers Global Environmental Change Mid-Career Award from the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the world’s largest Earth and space science society. He will receive the award at a ceremony during the 2021 AGU Fall Meeting in December.
Koven, who studies interactions between climate and the carbon cycle, is honored to be receiving an award presented annually and named for Piers Sellers, the late climate scientist turned astronaut who Koven feels fortunate to have met a couple of times prior to Sellers’ death in 2016.
“Piers was an incredibly talented, supportive, and fun person who was a real pioneer of vegetation and carbon modeling. It is a great honor to receive this award named for him,” Koven said.
The Piers J. Sellers Global Environmental Change Mid-Career Award recognizes outstanding contributions in research, educational, or societal impacts in the area of global environmental change, especially through interdisciplinary approaches. Sellers was an AGU Fellow and member of AGU’s Global Environmental Change Section who was a pioneer of vegetation and carbon modeling.
Koven develops and uses numerical models of soil, vegetation, and atmospheric processes to understand how terrestrial ecosystems such as tropical forests and the Arctic respond to climate change, and how these responses shift their balance of greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane. He was a lead contributor to the latest report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which focused on the physical science basis of climate change. Published last month, the report pointed to the urgent need to cut greenhouse gas emissions. More information about the AGU section awards can be found here.