FIBER · Understanding soil fertility impacts on terrestrial biomass production in a changing environment
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-02-28 → 2019-02-27
- EU contribution
- €158,122
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Understanding soil fertility impacts on terrestrial biomass production in a changing environment
This projected addressed how droughts affect photosynthesis, vegetation productivity and the global carbon cycle. Remote-sensing based models are widely used for estimating terrestrial photosynthesis. These commonly use information about the greenness of the Earth surface, incoming solar radiation and some measure of dryness. Due to the limitation that soil moisture is particularly challenging to observe from satellites, these models have commonly resorted to using information only on the atmospheric dryness (vapour pressure deficit). In view of known physiological mechanisms by which plants respond to drying soils, the question is: Does vapour pressure deficit alone provide enough information to simulate drought impacts on vegetation? Understanding vegetation sensitivity to droughts is important for estimating the impacts of extreme events and the year-to-year variations of the terrestrial carbon balance. Dry and hot periods like last year’s summer in northern Europe can negatively affect the C balance of a whole continent and thereby accelerate the man-made increase in atmospheric CO2. The objective of this project was to develop a new method for detecting water stress on vegetation productivity, to test the widely-used assumption that atmospheric humidity provides sufficient information to capture drought effects, including soil water stress, and to characterise the drought-sensitivity of ecosystems across a wide range of climates.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The feedback between climate and the land carbon (C) cycle poses one of the largest uncertainties in climate change projections. FIBER targets the unresolved challenge for Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVM) to simulate effects of soil fertility and nutrient deposition on biomass productivity (BP) and the land C balance. Accumulating evidence documents how plants adjust their growth strategies and C allocation under multiple limiting resources. Current DGVMs lag behind these new insights, produce widely diverging results for C cycling and nutrient limitation under future scenarios and fail to explain the observed land C sink. This work will provide a new global modelling approach to simulating flexible plant C allocation following optimality principles. A better understanding of the controls on BP is crucial for assessing climate change impacts on ecosystem services and to reduce uncertainty in C cycle and climate change projections.I will develop a new type of plant growth model to predict increased root growth and export of labile C to soil biota on infertile soils and under low N inputs, consistent with powerful data from forest inventories and ecosystem manipulation experiments. By accounting for trade-offs between different growth strategies and a C cost of nutrient uptake, I will simulate the plant C economy under optimality constraints – a powerful approach, supported by observations but not exploited for DGVMs. The project is conceived to combine the relevant expertise and exploit the pioneering science of leading European researchers with my integrating role and demonstrated model development skills. Collaboration with two secondment hosts will facilitate the mining of their large data resources and fusing data into model predictions using Bayesian statistical tools. This project will integrate new model components developed at my current host institute and will be a crucial step on the way to building the next generation of vegetation models.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- CENTRO DE INVESTIGACION ECOLOGICA Y APLICACIONES FORESTALES · BELLATERRACoordinatorSpain
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union