Silver is a professor of ecosystem ecology at University of California, Berkeley. With a focus on ecosystem ecology and biogeochemistry, her research is often aimed at better understanding the soil system to mitigate the effects of climate change. A significant portion of her work has focused on tropical ecosystems, their soils, plants, and how nutrients and carbon cycle through them. Silver is the lead scientist at the Marin Carbon Project, which she helped found in 2008. The Marin Carbon Project uses science to improve land management, to think about the whole system and thus consider and value ecosystem services such as soil's C sequestration ability, and make farm and ranch management more centered around n carbon-sequestration. Through this project she is working with ranchers, using compost for carbon sequestration on ranch land in California, greatly improving the soil's ability to sequester carbon.
Awards and honors
Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow, 2009.
Google Science Communication Fellow, 2011.
Innovation Award from the American Carbon Registry, 2015.
Mayer, A., Z. Hausfather, A. D. Jones, and W. L. Silver. 2018. The Potential of Agricultural Land Management to Contribute to Lower Global Surface Temperatures. Sciences Advances. In Press.
O’Connell, C., L. Ruan, and W.L. Silver. 2018. Drought drives rapid shifts in tropical rainforest soil biogeochemistry and greenhouse gas emissions. Nature Communications DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03352-3.
Yang, W.H., R. Ryals, D.F. Cusack, and W.L. Silver. 2017. Cross-biome assessment of gross soil nitrogen cycling in California ecosystems. Soil Biology and Biochemistry107:144-155.
McNicol, G., C.S. Sturtevant, S.H. Knox, I. Dronova, D.D. Baldocchi, and W. L.Silver. 2017. Effects of seasonality, transport-pathway, and spatial structure on restored wetland greenhouse gas fluxes. Global Change Biology DOI: 10.1111/gcb.13580.
Ryals, R., V. T. Eviner, C. Stein, K. N. Suding, and W. L. Silver. 2016. Managing for multiple ecosystem services: are there tradeoffs between carbon sequestration, plant production and plant diversity in grasslands amended with compost? Ecosphere doi: 10.1002/ecs2.1270.
Hall, S. J., J. Treffkorn, and W. L. Silver. 2014. Breaking the enzymatic latch: Impacts of reducing conditions on hydrolytic enzyme activity in tropical forest soils. Ecology95: 2964-2973.
Liptzin, D. and W. L. Silver. 2015. Spatial patterns in oxygen and redox sensitive biogeochemistry in tropical forest soils. Ecosphere6: 1-14.
Silver, W. L., S. J. Hall, and G. González. 2014. Differential effects of canopy trimming and litter deposition on litterfall and nutrient dynamics in a wet subtropical forest. Forest Ecology and Management332: 47-55.
