EAS Seminar: Dan Katz (Cornell)

Harnessing ecology and remote sensing to model airborne pollen concentrations

Pollen allergies afflict millions of North Americans, triggering both seasonal allergies and asthma attacks. Predictions of airborne pollen concentrations could help people to reduce their allergen exposure and manage their medications, but existing sources of information have critical limitations despite the public health importance of this topic. In this seminar, I will discuss the creation of process-based models of airborne pollen in systems including juniper trees in Texas and spring-flowering trees in Detroit. These examples show how plant ecology and remote sensing can provide the foundation for operational pollen forecasting models by filling in a key knowledge gap: the amount and timing of pollen release.

Bio:
Dan Katz is an assistant professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science at Cornell University, where he works at the intersection of plant ecology and public health. His current research focuses on modeling airborne pollen concentrations and the cooling effects of urban trees. To do so, he measures ecological processes using field studies, scales from individual plants to landscapes with remote sensing, and combines these into models related to ecosystem services and disservices; he also incorporates methods from Bayesian statistics, citizen science, engineering, and epidemiology.