Lixin Wang, a professor at the Department of Earth Sciences at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, was the featured speaker of the Climate / Atmospheric Science & Engineering (CASE) Colloquium series on Nov. 18, 2022. The presentation was titled "Drought characterization and impacts on agriculture and natural ecosystems."

The CASE Colloquium is presented by the University of Iowa's Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research and the Iowa Technology Institute. Find past CASE presentations here.

ABSTRACT: Drought is considered one of the most pressing natural hazards that influences water resources, agricultural production, and natural ecosystems. This talk will discuss the drought impacts on the agricultural production of major crop groups, drought impacts on ecosystem productivity, and the development of a new drought impact index to effectively characterize drought over diverse climate conditions. Lastly, it will discuss the observed water constraints on vegetation growth in the Northern Hemisphere over the last three decades.

BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Lixin Wang is a professor at the Department of Earth Sciences, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Before IUPUI, he spent three years as a research associate at Princeton University and one and half years at the University of New South Wales (Australia) as a Vice-Chancellor Research Fellow. He was awarded his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Dr. Wang’s research field is ecohydrology. He has published more than 200 research articles in peer-reviewed journals including articles in Science, Science Advances, Nature Ecology and Evolution, Nature Climate Change, and Nature Communications. He is an editor of Hydrology and Earth System Sciences (HESS), and associate editor of the Journal of Hydrology, Journal of Arid Environments. Among other awards, he is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2016, the President’s Bicentennial Medal from Indiana University in 2021 and the Research Trailblazer Award from IUPUI in 2020.