My main research interest lies in the intersection between the global carbon cycle, theoretical ecology, and mathematics. I have a 50% appointment at the Department of Ecology in SLU, and a 50% appoitment at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany.
Some of my main research questions include:
- For how long does carbon stay in terrestrial ecosystems and the entire terrestrial biosphere?
- How long would it take to remove carbon of fossil-fuel origen from the atmosphere-biosphere-surface ocean system?
- Can we adaptively manage terrestrial ecosystems to increase the time carbon remains stored before returning to the atmosphere?
Sierra, C. A., Metzler, H., Müller, M., & Kaiser, E. (2021). Closed-loop and congestion control of the global carbon-climate system. Climatic Change, 165(1), 15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-021-03040-0
Sierra, C. A., Crow, S. E., Heimann, M., Metzler, H., & Schulze, E.-D. (2021). The climate benefit of carbon sequestration. Biogeosciences, 18(3), 1029–1048. https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-18-1029-2021
Sierra, C. A., Hoyt, A. M., He, Y., & Trumbore, S. E. (2018). Soil Organic Matter Persistence as a Stochastic Process: Age and Transit Time Distributions of Carbon in Soils. Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 32(10), 1574–1588. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018GB005950
Sierra, C. A., Ceballos-Núñez, V., Metzler, H., & Müller, M. (2018). Representing and Understanding the Carbon Cycle Using the Theory of Compartmental Dynamical Systems. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 10(8), 1729–1734. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018MS001360
Sierra, C. A., & Müller, M. (2015). A general mathematical framework for representing soil organic matter dynamics. Ecological Monographs, 85, 505–524. https://doi.org/10.1890/15-0361.1
Sierra, C. A., Trumbore, S. E., Davidson, E. A., Vicca, S., & Janssens, I. (2015). Sensitivity of decomposition rates of soil organic matter with respect to simultaneous changes in temperature and moisture. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 7(1), 335–356. https://doi.org/10.1002/2014MS000358