The role of community dynamics in constraining regional-scale carbon cycle estimates: Assimilating forest inverntory data into the Ecosystem Demography model

Background/Question/Methods

Community processes play a critical role in shaping not only biodiversity, but also the long-term feedbacks in the carbon and water cycles and the land surface energy budget. However, ongoing efforts to calibrate and validate ecosystem models have focused largely on short-term fluxes and less attention has been paid to the importance of long-term demographic processes, succession, and disturbance to understanding climate change feedbacks.

Results/Conclusions

We will present the results of ongoing efforts to constrain the Ecosystem Demography model v2.2 (ED2), a community-structured terrestrial biosphere model, across eastern temperate forests using individual-level data from the Forest Inventory and Analysis. Particular attention will be paid to incorporating the drivers of tree mortality into the ED2 model, as small shifts in mortality rates can have large impacts on both community dynamics and the carbon-cycle over multi-decadal time-scales. We will also present initial estimates of a carbon-cycle 'reanalysis' over the past decade over northern Wisconsin generated by synthesizing FIA data, tower-based fluxes, and remote sensing within ED2 using the Predictive Ecosystem Analyser (PEcAn) ecoinformatics and data assimilation tools.