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Predicted Impacts of Rising Carbon Dioxide and Temperature on Forests in Europe at stand scale

Objective

To make predictions of the likely impacts of rising CO2 and temperature on forest stands of well-researched trees in different parts of Europe and to scale up responses in space and time to local landscape scale of ca 50 peseta 50 km, for which historic and future climate scenarios are available on a Europe-wide basis.

The basic strategy is to focus on existing process-based, deterministic models at the scale of the
stand. The models already available amongst the Partners involve overstorey, understorey,
ground layer and soil, and include explicit formulations of physiological, developmental and
growth processes at the scales at which impacts of CO2 concentration and temperature have been
demonstrated. These models will be compared one with another, improved, extended and
rationalised with the aim of arriving at a consensus for making predictions of global impacts at
stand scale. The models will be parameterised for particular forest stands in different climate and
adaptive regions of Europe with parameters obtained in earlier EU supported programs, obtained
during this project by the group of Partners, and obtained in parallel projects elsewhere. The
models will be validated at stand scale by comparisons between the predicted fluxes of CO2 and
water vapour and fluxes measured in a parallel project (EUROFLUX) in the current ambient
climate at several sites in different parts of Europe. They will also be validated in future
climates by comparison between model predictions of fluxes and growth and measurements made
in mini-stands and ecosystems where model forests are grown in both ambient and elevated CO2
concentration.
The validated models will be applied to selected stands of trees in different parts of Europe for
which appropriate parameterisations are possible, and predictions made of the likely impact of
global environmental change on the functions and yield of the stand. For this goal, the climate
variables will be regarded as independent driving variables.
The final stage of the project will be to take feedbacks between the forest and the atmosphere
into account and to scale up forest-atmosphere interactions over landscapes approximately 50
peseta 50 km in extent - the area for which future climate scenarios are now available for the
whole of Europe, downscaled from General Circulation Model (GCM) predictions. Forest-soil
interactions will also be scaled up in time by taking account of changes in slowly varying pools
of soil organic matter over time periods of 100 years during which a doubling of the atmospheric
CO2 concentration is likely to occur.

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Call for proposal

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Funding Scheme

CSC - Cost-sharing contracts

Coordinator

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
EU contribution
No data
Address
Darwin Building, King's Building, Mayfield Road
EH9 3JG Edinburgh
United Kingdom

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Participants (11)

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Last update: 18 September 1998

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Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/ENV4950077

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