Clément Lopez-Canfin
SSS Soil System Sciences
The 2021 Virtual Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (vOSPP) Award is awarded to Clément Lopez-Canfin for the poster/PICO entitled:
Disparate responses of soil-atmosphere CO2 exchange to biophysical and geochemical factors over a biocrust ecological succession in the Tabernas Desert (Lopez-Canfin, C.; Lázaro, R.; Sánchez-Cañete, E. P.)
Click here to download the poster/PICO file.
Clément Lopez-Canfin is currently employed as a research technician for the Applied Physics Department of the University of Granada (UGR, Spain) and at the same time enrolled as a PhD student in Earth Science (UGR), in a project led by the Department of Desertification and Geoecology of the Experimental Station of Arid Zones (Almería, Spain). His PhD thesis is about the soil-atmosphere CO2 and H2O exchanges in a dryland, with particular focus on the role of biological soil crusts succession, microclimate and soil chemistry. During its thesis, he developed experience in installing and maintaining networks of environmental sensors in situ, using mainly the gradient method to estimate the soil-atmosphere CO2 and water vapor fluxes. He designed a low-cost embedded system with an Arduino microcontroller in order to measure the content and reactive surface area of carbonates in soil samples, as well as the dissolved inorganic carbon in liquid samples. In EGU21, he presented research results revealing the existence of nocturnal CO2 uptake by soil in a dryland. Currently, he is particularly interested in the role of water vapor adsorption on ecosystem processes as well as in monitoring carbonate precipitation-dissolution rates in soil, assessing their role in the carbon balance of drylands and understanding the potential effect of climate change on their dynamics.