European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2019

Venue: European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2019 | Vienna | 7–12 April 2019
Co-conveners: Sönke Zaehle
Human activities are altering a range of environmental conditions, including atmospheric CO2 concentration, climate, and nutrient inputs. However, understanding and predicting their combined effect on ecosystem structure and functioning and biogeochemical cycles is challenging. Divergent future projections of terrestrial ecosystem models reflect open questions about fundamental processes and missing observational constraints. Models are routinely tested and calibrated against data from ecosystem flux measurements, remote sensing, atmospheric inversions and ecosystem inventories. While these constrain the current mean state of the terrestrial biosphere, they provide limited information on the sensitivity of ecophysiological, biogeochemical, and hydrological processes to environmental changes. Observational and ecosystem manipulation studies (e.g., Free-Air Carbon Dioxide Enrichment (FACE), nutrient addition or warming experiments) can provide unique insights and inform model development and evaluation.
This session focuses on how ecosystem processes respond to changes in CO2 concentration, atmospheric conditions, water and nutrient availability. It aims at fostering the interaction between experimental and modelling communities by advancing the use of observational and experimental data for model evaluation and calibration. We encourage contributions from syntheses of multiple experiments, model intercomparisons and evaluations against ecosystem manipulation experiments, pre-experimental modelling, or the use of observations from "natural experiments". Contributions may span a range of scales and scopes, including plant ecophysiology, soil organic matter dynamics, soil microbial activity, nutrient cycling, plant-soil interactions, or ecosystem dynamics.

Venue: European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2019 | Vienna | 7–12 April 2019
Co-conveners: Nuno Carvalhais
Monitoring and modeling of vegetation and ecosystem dynamics is fundamental in diagnosing and forecasting Earth system states and feedbacks. However, the underlying ecosystem processes are still relatively poorly described by Earth system models. Confronting terrestrial biogeochemical models at multiple temporal and spatial scales with an ever-increasing amount and diversity of Earth observation data is therefore needed.
To this end, the rapidly growing amount of satellite data has fostered the development of novel global satellite products of vegetation and ecosystem properties (such as fluorescence, microwave vegetation optical depth, biomass, multi-sensor climate data records, new high resolution products), which complement more traditional products, like NDVI, LAI or fAPAR. In this session, we present the most recent advances in:
(1) the production of global land surface biophysical and biochemical variables from satellite observations;
(2) assessment of plausibility, validation and intercomparisons of these products;
(3) their use in studying global ecosystem dynamics related to, e.g., climate variability and change;
(4) benchmarking and improvement of global vegetation models through statistical analysis and model-data integration techniques.
The latter may consider methodological foci or include applications related to the monitoring and modeling of terrestrial vegetation and ecosystem dynamics for timescales from days to decades, also including multiple data streams.

Venue: European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2019 | Vienna | 7–12 April 2019
Co-conveners: Yunpeng Luo, Catarina Moura, René Orth
Forests play a major role in regulating global carbon and water cycling, and land-atmosphere interactions. Global environmental change such as CO2 fertilization, drought, warming, precipitation variability, nitrogen deposition, and disturbances can have a large influence on forest vegetation and soils and thus on energy and carbon and water fluxes across spatial and temporal scales. As global change is expected to accelerate in the future, vegetation is likely to be affected by large-scale tree mortality, vegetation phenology, changes in forest cover and shifts in species composition. In addition, changes in soil stoichiometry and further changes in metabolic activity of influenced microbial community would possibly exert strong feedback on forest vegetation. This session focuses on novel insights on patterns, drivers and mechanisms governing forest carbon and water dynamics. We welcome submissions on dynamics of forest vegetation and soil microbial activities, and their impact on carbon and water fluxes, which conducted through observational, experimental and modeling approaches at local, regional or global spatial scales.