Dr. Sean Michaletz was selected to receive the 2022 AGU Global Environmental Change Early Career Award for his original, synthetic research linking environmental variation to plant physiology across scales, from leaves to the biosphere. Dr. Michaletz is an assistant professor in the Department of Botany and the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. His research lies at the nexus of the physical and life sciences and combines interdisciplinary approaches from fields such as physics, engineering, geoscience, plant physiology, and ecology. His research involves development of mechanistic theory and models, which are parameterized, tested, and refined using data from the laboratory and the field. He also conducts long-term monitoring of climate, ecophysiology, and vegetation dynamics in a growing network of Forest MacroSystems sites located around the world. Here I highlight three areas in which Dr. Michaletz’s contributions have been especially impactful: (1) Leaf temperatures, traits, and rates: Dr. Michaletz synthesized energy budget and carbon economics theories to link climate, functional traits, and photosynthetic rates and help understand the implications of traits for leaf thermal behavior and carbon economics. His contributions drove a resurgence of interest in energy budgets, which were prominent in ecophysiology from the 1960s to 1980s but had come to be seen as old hat by some. (2) Drivers of plant and ecosystem functioning: In a series of papers, Dr. Michaletz extended metabolic scaling theory to mathematically formalize competing hypotheses for drivers of net primary production (NPP) and test the hypotheses using the largest global data set compiled to date. He showed that conventional understanding of climate-NPP relationships was based on spurious relationships and that climate has a primarily indirect influence on NPP. (3) Fire effects on vegetation: Dr. Michaletz’s research on the physical mechanisms linking fire behavior to whole-plant physiology helped set an agenda that has guided research for over a decade. His modeling studies showed how plant traits mediate heat transfer and physiological injuries in vegetation during fires, and his experimental work demonstrated how heat impairs the hydraulic functioning of plant vascular tissues. Dr. Michaletz is a rising star in global change science. Given his enormous contributions to understanding plant-environment interactions, and for their influence on the field, we are proud to recognize Dr. Michaletz with this honor. —Mary O’Connor, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

I am thrilled to receive the AGU Global Environmental Change Early Career Award. Thank you, Mary, for your nomination and your kind words. It is an honor to have been nominated by you. Your own contributions to global environmental change have long inspired my work, and your mentorship over the past several years has been invaluable as I’ve developed my career at the University of British Columbia. I would also like to thank some of the mentors and collaborators I’ve been fortunate to work with over the years. Brian Enquist, Ed Johnson, Nate McDowell, and Peter Reich were formal mentors who showed me how to combine observation, experiment, theory, and modeling to tackle big questions by distilling the complexity of nature into a set of relatively simple causal mechanisms. Jim Brown, Drew Kerkhoff, Colin Prentice, Mel Tyree, Vigdis Vandvik, and Dick Waring have long been sources of inspiration, encouragement, and support. Luiza Aparecido, Adam Atchley, Benjamin Blonder, Vanessa Buzzard, Aud Halbritter, Kevin Hultine, Marc Macias Fauria, Brian Maitner, Stephanie Pau, and Martijn Slot have been important collaborators who helped shape the core of my current research program. I must also thank the students and postdocs from my lab group, who continue to push the boundaries of my interests and understanding: Nicole Bison, Isaac Borrego, Lachlan Byrnes, Marcella Cross, Hugo Galvão Cândido, Josef Garen, Elizabeth Kleynhans, Raquel Partelli Feltrin, Timothy Perez, and Milos Simovic. I would also like to acknowledge David Gates, whose pioneering work led to what we now know as ecophysiology, Earth system science, and remote sensing. All of my research builds upon his approaches. And finally, thank you to the AGU Global Environmental Change section for highlighting and promoting excellence in research in global environmental change through this award. I am honored to receive the recognition, and I look forward to many more years of participation with the section and with AGU. —Sean Michaletz, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada