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Long-term consequences of altered tree growth and physiology in the Earth System

Project description

Improved forest simulations for a changing world

Forests cover around a third of the planetwide vegetation and are a crucial component of the global climate. Any changes in their interactions with their surroundings can seriously affect the rest of the environment. The unprecedented human activity in multiple locations has created worldwide instability. This instability that impacts climate change to a dangerous extent makes the important earth system models that help monitor and predict future interactions untrustworthy. The EU-funded CATES project offers a solution, which will develop a novel cross-disciplinary framework for improved forest simulation that would acknowledge water-use efficiency, tree-ring growth and other significant factors to stay ahead of climate change.

Objective

Forests cover a third of the vegetated surface of the Earth and interact with global climate. These interactions are being altered by human activities at an unprecedented scale, both in their rate and in their geographical extent. At present, Earth system models (ESMs) struggle to predict how these climate-vegetation interactions will evolve in the future because of varied responses of the carbon cycle in their Land Surface Models (LSMs). This long-standing issue leads to widely varying atmospheric CO2 concentrations and hence varying climate projections under the same scenarios. LSM projections of forest biomass and carbon balance increasingly diverge over longer periods, thus limiting confidence in future climate projections. The goal of this proposal is to develop a new cross-disciplinary framework to constrain climate projections by jointly improving the simulation of forest growth and water use efficiency (WUE; the ratio of photosynthesis to transpiration) at long time scales (decades to century) using novel observational standards for historical growth and physiology derived from tree-ring data. The following three objectives are addressed: (1) advance the mechanistic representation of tree-ring growth and stable isotopes in the global LSM ORCHIDEE, the terrestrial component of the IPSL ESM; (2) use tree-ring data together with eddy covariance flux measurements to improve the capability of the model to simulate the effects of changing climate, CO2 and nitrogen on forest growth and WUE; (3) provide the first climate simulations until 2100 constrained by historical forest responses. The constrained projections will reduce uncertainties on the feedbacks of altered tree growth and physiology on climate. The proposed work will bring into Earth System modelling decades of advances made by dendrochronologists around the world, providing at last a critical long-term constraint for the land surface modelling community as ice-cores are for global circulation models.

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(opens in new window) ERC-2021-STG

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Host institution

CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 499 965,00
Address
RUE MICHEL ANGE 3
75794 PARIS
France

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Region
Ile-de-France Ile-de-France Hauts-de-Seine
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Research Organisations
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 499 965,00

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