Research Scientist · Caltech & NASA JPL Affiliate

Renato K. Braghiere

I study land–atmosphere interactions and their response to global change, with an emphasis on the global carbon cycle — building more mechanistic land-surface models, from radiation in plant canopies to the nutrient economics of whole ecosystems, to sharpen projections of the living planet under future climate.

News

2026New paper in Science on the global density and biomass of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks.
Apr 2026Invited talk “Closing the Carbon Gap” at the 4th Dynamic Vegetation Modeling & Observations Conference, Woods Hole.
2025Co-first-author paper on leaf traits and vegetation optical properties published in Nature Communications.
2025SHIFT campaign vegetation traits & fluxes datasets released on CaltechDATA.
2023–2026Awarded a Resnick Sustainability Institute grant at Caltech.

What I work on

Vegetation structure & photosynthesis

How canopy architecture and 3-D radiative transfer shape global carbon uptake — and why Earth System Models underestimate photosynthesis when they ignore structure.

Carbon–nutrient economics

Representing carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles — including mycorrhizal symbioses — to project the true cost of plant nutrient acquisition under climate change.

Observation-guided modelling

Closing the land-carbon gap by fusing hyperspectral remote sensing, flux towers, and models (CliMA Land, CARDAMOM, ILAMB, TRENDY).

Conceptual schematic of plant, canopy and leaf traits controlling radiation, carbon and water in the CliMA Land model — Coupling plant traits, radiative transfer, and sun-induced fluorescence in a next-generation land model.— Wang et al. (2021), GMD — CC BY 4.0

Data & tools

Interactive dashboards

Model-evaluation and benchmarking dashboards from my research, gathered in one place — including the new TRENDY dashboardand the full ILAMB suite. See Data & Tools.