Keith Lewin has spent his career at Brookhaven investigating the effects of pollutants and climate change on crops and natural ecosystems. His areas of expertise are developing equipment and facilities to apply and quantify experimental treatments and environmental conditions and the management of field research facilities. In the early 1980’s Keith designed a rainfall exclusion shelter and artificial rain delivery system used at BNL, the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and Penn State University to study Acid Rain effects on agricultural crops. Keith Lewin was lead engineer on the 1985 BNL initiative that developed the first Free-Air CO2 Enrichment (FACE) facility. The BNL FACE facility was the first manipulative experiment to reliably maintain elevated levels of carbon dioxide in large, unenclosed field plots and provided the basic design for similar FACE experiments deployed world-wide. From 1985 to the present Keith Lewin has led or assisted in the design, construction and management of FACE experiments in the USA, Switzerland, Germany, Panama, New Zealand and Australia to study the effects of elevated CO2 and ozone levels on meadows, field crops and forests. Keith continues working with research organizations from around the world that want to build and operate FACE research facilities
In addition to the above activities, Keith is currently working on the design and deployment of equipment to impose temperature treatments on open or enclosed field plots and instrumentation to monitor the temporal and 3-D spatial variability of CO2, temperature and humidity within research plots.
Kimball, BA, Conley, MM & Lewin, KF (2012) Performance and energy costs associated with scaling infrared heater arrays for warming field plots from 1 to 100 m. (pdf) Theoretical and Applied Climatology 108, 247–265, DOI 10.1007/s00704-011-0518-5.
Calfapietra C, Ainsworth EA, Beier C, De Angelis P, Ellsworth DS, Godbold DL, Hendrey GR, Hickler T, Hoosbeek MR, Karnosky DF, King J, Körner C, Leakey ADB, Lewin KF, Liberloo M, Long SP, Lukac M, Matyssek R, Miglietta F, Nagy J, Norby RJ, Oren R, Percy KE, Rogers A, Scarascia-Mugnozza G, Stitt M, Taylor G, Ceulemans R (2010) Challenges in elevated CO2 experiments on forests. (pdf) Trends in Plant Science 15, 5-10.
Lewin KF, Nagy J, Nettles WR, Cooley DM, Rogers A (2009) Comparison of gas use efficiency and treatment uniformity in a forest ecosystem exposed to elevated [CO2] using pure and pre-diluted Free Air CO2 Enrichment technology. (pdf) Global Change Biology 15, 388-395.
Ainsworth EA, Beier C, Calfapietra C, Cuelemans R, Durand-Tarfid M, Godbold DL, Hendrey GR, Hickler T, Kaduk J, Karnosky DF, Kimball BA, Körner C, Koorneef M, LaFarge T, Leakey ADB, Lewin KF, Long SP, Manderscheid R, McNeil DL, Mies TA, Miglietta F, Morgan JA, Nagy J, Norby RJ, Norton RM, Percy KE, Rogers A, Soussana J-F, Stitt M, Weigel H-J, White JW (2008) Next generation of elevated [CO2] experiments with crops: A critical investment for feeding the future world. (pdf) Plant, Cell & Environment 31, 1317-1324.