An ecosystem approach in agricultural and forest meteorology

Background/Question/Methods

Recently, an interdisciplinary program in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology (AgFM) has been established at Seoul National University, which is focused on education and research in water and food security, complex systems, and sustaianbility. The program vision is to cultivate leaders and stewards, who are prepared to engage in global sustainability challenge by envisioning and implementing sustainable solutions to the current and future agricultural and environmental problems in complex ecological-societal systems, by equipping them with key competencies in sustainability through resilience-based systems thinking and visioneering. The faculties are encouraged to introduce emergent dynamics (e.g., thermodynamics, morphodynamics) in their disciplines, thereby reflecting diverse epistemological stances in the integration of ecological possibilities and social preference into narrative descriptions, thereby resolving a shared community vision.

Results/Conclusions

In this presentation, as a practical first step example, an ecosystem approach is applied to translate the observed forest carbon dynamics into narratives. The eddy covariance flux measurements from 2007 to 2010 are used to examine the carbon and water exchange in two adjacent deciduous and coniferous forest ecosystems in central Korea. Traditional descriptive analysis revealed contasting interannual variabilities in net carbon uptake and evapotranspiration between the two forests, which are consistent with the interpretation on the basis of resilience framework. In thermodynamic analysis, net entropy production of the two forests were different in magnitude but their interannual variability was similar. Finally, the analysis of information entropy using the same data enabled to delineate the systems' state in terms of process network with an indaction of self-organization.