CarbonÂ-WaterÂ-Vegetation Interactions in Drylands and their Response to Climate and Environmental Change
Dryland ecosystems play a key role in many interactions between different parts of the earth system. They are hotspots of land-atmosphere interactions, and are also thought to play a dominant role in year-to-year variability of global terrestrial carbon cycling and long-term capacity of the land to store carbon. Understanding which regions, and which processes, are driving global carbon cycle variability and long-term carbon storage is crucial for predicting the level of anthropogenic CO2 emissions that will remain in the atmosphere, and thus the allowable emissions that we can afford to remain under a given threshold rise in global temperature.
However, despite their importance in the earth system, dryland ecosystem processes remain poorly understood and not well modelled. As a result of our lack of process understanding and model predictive capacity, many questions about dryland ecosystem responses and feedbacks to current and future climate and environmental change remain unanswered.
In this research we will use a wide range of existing field, satellite, and experimental manipulation data to a) improve our understanding of dryland ecosystem vegetation, biocrust, and soil processes; b) develop new mathematical functions of key dryland processes and ensure they are accurately implemented into global scale models; and c) constrain uncertainty in the newly developed models via a rigorous statistical data assimilation framework. We will then use the improved, data-constrained models to better understand how dryland ecosystem processes interacting across scales will be impacted by climate change, and how changing dryland ecosystem structure and functioning will feedback to changes in climate.
Students supported by this grant include Joy Kehinde Adebisi (PhD) and Liam Bogukci (USRI).
The MacBean Lab 