#AGU23 is around the corner!Pinhsin will be there and present her poster on “Plant trait diversity stabilizes climate in a wet and cool state via maximizing terrestrial water recycling” on Thursday, December 14th, 8:30 AM – 12:50 PM PST, in the session “GC41M: The Global Water Cycle: Coupling and Exchanges Between the Ocean, Land, Cryosphere, and Atmosphere I Poster” at MC, Poster Hall A-C – South.
Biodiversity is known to be critical for sustaining ecosystem functions and ecosystem stability. However, to what extent plant trait diversity influences global climate is so far poorly understood because the state-of-the-art climate models underestimate biosphere complexity in their representation of vegetation processes.
To tackle this issue, Pinhsin built a new trait-based plant diversity model JeDi-BACH (based on Kleidon and Mooney, 2000), which can now be coupled with the global atmospheric circulation model ICON-A. Unlike the traditional plant parametrization scheme, JeDi-BACH lets the environment select suitable growth strategies based on some well-known ecological trade-off relationships. Thereby, JeDi-BACH can easily obtain adaptive ecosystems that are tailored to the given environment without much constraints on trait diversity.
Figure: Estimates in water availability of all land grid cells for the high diversity (HD) world and low diversity (LD) world using Budyko curves based on the equation of Choudhury (1999), EI = ((AI^n)/(1+AI^n))^(1/n). EI denotes evaporative index, AI is aridity index, AET is actual evaporation, PET is potential evaporation, and P is for precipitation.
With this new coupled model (JeDi-BACH in a coupled setup with ICON-A), Pinhsin assesses biodiversity-climate interactions simultaneously under different diversity scenarios. Pinhsin shows that high diversity systems stabilize terrestrial climate in a wet and cool state via maximizing terrestrial water recycling. As shown in the Figure, the evaporative index (the ratio of actual evaporation to precipitation) shifts to higher values from a low diversity world (purple dots) to a high diversity world (green dots). Her study demonstrates the importance of “biodiversity-climate feedbacks” and highlights the role of plant functional diversity in shaping a robust climate. To learn more about her work, visit her poster or meet her in person (or email her).
References
[1] Kleidon, A and H A Mooney (2000). “A global distribution of diversity inferred from climatic contraints: results from a process-based modelling study.” In: Global Change Biology 6, pp. 507–523. issn: 13541013. doi: 10.1046/j.1365- 2486.2000.00332.x.
[2] Choudhury, B.J., 1999. Evaluation of an empirical equation for annual evaporation using field observations and results from a biophysical model. Journal of Hydrology, 216, 99–110. doi:10.1016/S0022-1694(98)00293-5.
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