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LPJ-GUESS Research

Strategic Research Areas

MERGE 

ModElling the Regional and Global Earth system
- world-leading treatments of climate-terrestrial biosphere interactions

MERGE is a strategic research area with focus on reliable modelling of the Regional and Global Earth system. It is a collaboration between Lund University, University of Gothenburg, Rossby Centre/SMHI, Linnaeus University, Chalmers University of Technology, and the Royal Institute of Technology.

MERGE is hosted by the Faculty of Science at Lund University. It involves more than 250 researchers, including senior scientists, young scientists, and other contributing staff.

Contact: Paul Miller 

Source: MERGE homepage 

BECC 

Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate
- world-leading research on biodiversity and ecosystem services in a changing climate - addressing society's need for knowledge to tackle some of the most complex social-ecological challenges of our time

Engaging about 300 researchers at Lund University and the University of Gothenburg, BECC brings together scientists from the natural and social sciences. Together we provide a scientific basis for the sustainable management of ecosystems and biodiversity.BECC consists of scientists from different research backgrounds and include:

  • natural and social sciences,
  • observational data and modelling, 
  • basic and applied research,
  • intradisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary takes on research questions, and 
  • matters of regional, national or international interest.

Contact: Anna Maria Jönsson

Source: BECC homepage

Profile Area: Nature-based future solutions

The profile area focuses on ecosystem-based approaches to handle biodiversity loss and climate change, and how the intertwined crises can be linked to sustainable societal development. Nature-based future solutions is one of five profile areas at Lund University.

Contact: Paul Miller 

Unit profile in the Reseach Portal

LPJ-GUESS Projects

This project will combine ground-based observations from forest inventory and demographic vegetation modelling with LPJ-GUESS to create a global reanalysis of forest dynamics (growth, mortality, establishment) and carbon cycling. 

Funder: European Research Council 

Dates: 2024-2029

People involved: Stefan Olin and Thomas Pugh

AI4PEX

This project will explore the potential for artificial intelligence to improve Earth system modelling. We will directly implement machine-learning-based mechanisms within LPJ-GUESS to create hybrid process-AI modelling, with a focus on tree mortality.

Dates: 2024-2028

People involved: Adrian Gustafsson, Karl Piltz, Lars Nieradzik, and Paul Miller

Lucat

Observation of Ecosystem Changes for Action (OBSGESSION) focuses on the potential for remote sensing-based Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs), in combination with field observations, process-based modelling and AI modelling, to study how biodiversity across terrestrial and freshwater domains is changing, to understand the underpinning processes, and identify management levers for improving ecosystem condition. 
Coordinated by the Finnish Environment Institute (Syke), and involving partners from 9 European countries, this four-year project will deliver science-based solutions to maintain the integrity and biodiversity of natural ecosystems in the face of unprecedented environmental and social change. 
Lund University contributes process-based modelling of detection and attribution of ecosystem state, leveraging the capabilities of the LPJ-GUESS dynamic vegetation model. In collaboration with University of Twente, we will deliver a biodiversity pilot to demonstrate a powerful new combination of earth observation data, process-based modelling and geospatial machine learning to monitor and forecast effects of climate change and disturbances on ecosystem productivity and health for representative forest landscapes in Europe.

Obsgession

Figure 1. OBSGESSION builds further on technologies developed in the EO4Diversity projects. Shown here: EO-adjusted LPJ-GUESS output of forest net primary production for August 2016, work by Mats Lindeskog.

Funder: European Commission - Horizon Europe

Dates: 2023-2028

People involved: Ali Mansourian, Anna Maria Jönsson, Annemarie Eckes-Shephard, Ben Smith, Fredrik Lagergren, Mats Lindeskog, Rachid Oucheickh, and Thomas Pugh

Lucat

Project homepage

Here we explore the role that the world’s forests and forest demography play in the world’s methane budget, with LPJ-GUESS as the key tool. 

Funder: UK Natural Environment Research Council 

Dates: 2024-2027

People involved: Paul Miller and Thomas Pugh

Project homepage

This project links up with Sveaskog, a major Swedish forest owner, to develop capabilities to use LPJ-GUESS modelling to identify areas of forest at higher risk of drought stress, in order to facilitate optimized management interventions. 

Funder: FORMAS Swedish Research Council 

Dates: 2024-2027

People involved: Anders Ahlström, Cecilia Akselsson, Natascha Kljun, Stefan Olin,  and Thomas Pugh

Lucat

We will investigate how climate change will affect soil microbial resistance and resilience to predicted drought and seasonal drought cycles, and its consequences for the land-atmosphere carbon (C) balance and soil fertility. We will determine how land-use (forestry and agriculture), soil structure, and plant-C input affect microbial drought responses. A network of field experiments will be superimposed on a well-described national climatic gradient (400-2000 mm MAP), for a “space-for-time substitution” to simulate future climates. Microbial ecology insights will be used to build a state-of-the-art mechanistic microbial representation in LPJ-GUESS and the Earth system model (ESM) EC-Earth.

Funder: FORMAS

Dates: 2024-2026

People involved: David Wårlind

Lucat

The Arctic experiences amplified warming and increased heatwaves. It is essential to understand how plants cope with these fast-changing thermal conditions and alter their climate impacts. This project will integrate in-situ and satellite observations, laboratory experiments, and mathematical modelling (including LPJ-GUESS and EC-Earth) to elucidate the fundamental role of plant thermal temperature in influencing several plant processes and regional climate.

Funder: Villum

Dates: 2023-2028

People involved: Jing Tang

Project homepage

PERENNIAL is funded by the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant 2023). In this project we will investigate whether a shift from annual to perennial grain crops as the basis for food production is possible, and identify the major opportunities and obstacles for such a “perennial revolution”. 

Dates: 2023-2028

People involved: Adrian Gustafsson and Stefan Olin

Lucat

The main motivation of the project is to fill the knowledge gap of how global climate and terrestrial ecosystem interact with the unusual type of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the past and future which persists through the Northern Hemisphere summer season. We will apply a blended approach combining Earth system model (ESM, with coupled atmosphere, ocean, land, dynamic vegetation, wildfire & terrestrial carbon cycling components) simulations and proxy reconstructions of past climate variability, and test the hypothesis that the changing seasonal insolation spawns a regime-shift from a winter-maximum to summer-maximum El Niño, and it further leads to massive reorganizations in the coupled ocean-atmosphere-terrestrial ecosystem. Particularly, to quantify how the terrestrial vegetation and carbon cycling are fundamentally altered by ENSO variations, we will design LPJ-GUESS sensitivity simulations based on composites of climate forcings from conventional ENSO, summer-persistent ENSO, and neutral conditions.

Funder: Swedish Research Council

Dates: 2023-2027

People involved: Anna Schultze, Minjie Zheng, Qiong Zhang, Thomas Pugh, and Zhengyao Lu

Lucat

Here we explore the potential for rewilding options to provide climate change mitigation and biodiversity services in European forests. Our main tool in doing this is the LPJ-GUESS model. 

Funder: European Commission - Horizon Europe 

Dates: 2023-2026

People involved: Annemarie Eckes-Shephard, Haoming Zhong, and Thomas Pugh

Lucat

In this BECC funded project we will assess how the twin challenges of landuse and climate changes will affect microbial functioning, soil fertility and carbon (C) sequestration, by determining the microbial (i) resistance and (ii) resilience to drought. We will assess the microbial use of C, nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) from soil organic matter (SOM), and contribution to soil C sequestration. To accomplish this, we will assess field experiments in the landuse mosaic at Övedsklosters ägor. Insights will be incorporated into models for a state-of-the-art mechanistic representation of C-N-P cycling. 
Our target is to translate landuse management into functional consequences in terms of the resilience of supporting, regulating and ultimately provisioning ecosystem services to climate change-induced drought. We will quantify how landuse conversion will impact ecosystem-level C, N and P-fluxes, and their resilience to drought. By combining landuse comparisons with the rigour of experimental assessments resolving microbial ecology responses to drought, and synthesizing these insights via conceptual models and a ecosystem model, we will reduce a central source of uncertainty regarding the biophysical drivers of the soil carbon cycle. We will also specifically address how experimental changes of vegetation and soil management in different landuses will generate legacies for the microbial responses to drought.

Funder: BECC

Dates: 2023-2025

People involved: David Wårlind

Lucat

In this project, we quantify the responses in regional climate regime and terrestrial ecosystem (including crop yield) induced by large-scale solar panel and/or wind turbine installations in Nordic countries. We perform more realistic simulations using an advanced regional climate model WRF, coupled to an ecosystem model LPJ-GUESS, to study their impacts with a focus on the relevant changes in the land(vegetation)-climate feedbacks. The project will provide new scientific information to mitigate the potential damages for the wide application of solar and wind energy in Northern Europe. 

This is still working progress, and the model preparation (coupling climate and ecosystem models) can be understood as follows. We modified the output of a mesoscale regional climate WRF and a terrestrial ecosystem model LPJ-GUESS and enabled the communications between the two models. On one hand, LPJ-GUESS was driven by temperature, precipitation, and shortwave radiation derived from the WRF output; subsequently, the albedo, leaf area index, GreenFPAR, soil temperature, and land use simulated by LPJ-GUESS were used to drive WRF. Together this enabled the offline coupling process between the two models. 

Funder: Crafoord foundation

Dates: 2023-2024

People involved: Deliang Chen, Jing Tang, Paul Miller, and Zhengyao Lu

Lucat

SwForTrans aims to facilitate the assessment of Swedish forest resilience under changes in future climate extremes by making use of the recently available in-situ measurement of hydraulic variables, including the whole-tree sap-flow measurements in the research stations of ICOS-Sweden and SITES, for ecosystem modelling studies. We will combine the use of other materials and methods, including in-situ field measurement of meteorological and ecosystem status, and high-resolution satellite-based remote sensing images to investigate research questions closely related to Swedish forest resilience. The improved understanding of changes in forest transpiration under heatwaves and droughts in Sweden will help fill the knowledge gap of plants’ physiological response to short-term extreme growing conditions, which is vital to advance the understanding of tree mortality and recovery for high-latitude regions.

Dates: 2023-2024

People involved: Fredrik Lagergren, Maj-Lena Finnander Linderson, and Minchao Wu

Lucat

The demographic benchmarking initiative (D-BEN) emerged from the TreeMort project. It has brought together most of the state-of-the-art Demographically enabled vegetation models (ORCHIDEE, FATES, JULES-RED,LPJ-GUESS, BiomE, BiomE-P, SEIB-DGVM, CABLE-POP,EDv3) to perform simulations at the same sites and compare against the same outputs. 
The aim is 
1) to arrive at a suite of benchmarks at local and global scale that can make our predictions more robust and credible. 
2) highlight the strength of these models for performing policy-relevant simulations, both in terms of the output they produce, the dynamics they represent and the way they can be calibrated against real-world data. 
3) be a forum to discuss areas that need attention going forward. 

Dates: 2022-

People involved: Annemarie Eckes-Shephard, Stefan Olin, and Thomas Pugh

Lucat

In this project we are developing capability in LPJ-GUESS to combine with monitoring data of European forests to provide holistic assessments of forest variables, particularly carbon cycling. We then combine modelling with LPJ-GUESS with the EFISCEN-Space model to explore the future resilience of Europe’s forests. 

Dates: 2022-2027

People involved: Annemarie Eckes-Shephard, Haoming Zhong, Mats Lindeskog, and Thomas Pugh

Project homepage

Flux and soil measurements contrasting a perennial agricultural system with annual.

Funder: FORMAS, The Swedish Research Council

Dates: 2022-2027

People involved: Adrian Gustafsson, Jonas Ardö, and Stefan Olin

Lucat

Carbon dioxide continues to accumulate in the atmosphere, driven by human emissions. The future fate of the global forest carbon sink, which significantly slows CO2 increase in the atmosphere, helping to dampen climate change, remains poorly constrained, hindering mitigation and adaptation planning. A key gap concerns the role of phosphorus, crucial in limiting the productivity of Australian woodlands and tropical forests. Model-data fusion based on the results of a crossed CO2 x P experiment in Eucalyptus forest - EucFACE - will help close this vital knowledge gap, and leverage new mechanistic knowledge in a leading global model used for climate and emissions assessment.

Funder: Australian Research Council

Dates: 2022-2026

People involved: Ben Smith and David Wårlind

Lucat

We will investigate the potential that agricultural practices have to increase deep (30-100cm) soil carbon (C) stocks, while also improving mechanistic understanding of the processes that determine soil organic matter (SOM) persistence. Specifically, we will determine how agricultural paradigms with perennial crops (PC), supporting deep rhizospheres, can provide a means to both store C and maintain fertility. We will test fundamental soil science theory, and optimise the contradictive ecosystem services of mitigating climate change by storing C while maintaining soil fertility. We hypothesize that 1 conversion to PC systems with deep rhizospheres will increase SOM contents (via the microbial carbon pump), increase SOM retention time (increasing persistence), and reduce the nutrient content (N and P) locked in SOM, 2 belowground root input in PC systems will trigger a rhizosphere priming effect (RPE), resulting in recovery of nutrients (N and P) from SOM throughout the profile (<1m); and, 3 upscaling (LPJ-GUESS) the conversion to PC systems across Sweden will increase C stocks throughout the depth of the rhizosphere, while agricultural productivity will only be marginally reduced, due to targeted microbial N and P mineralisation. These anticipated effects will make agricultural soils 1 mitigate climate warming by storing C, 2 more resilient to indirect effects of warming (drought), 3 maintain a nutrient supply conducive for a sustainable agricultural productivity.

Funder: FORMAS

Dates: 2022-2026

People involved: David Wårlind

Lucat

This project seeks to improve capability to simulate the effects of forest disturbance agents (particularly bark beetles, wind and drought) on European forests, using the LPJ-GUESS model. 

Funder: ERA-Net project, funded in Sweden by the Swedish Research Council Vinnova  

Dates: 2022-2025

People involved: Anna Maria Jönsson, Annemarie Eckes-Shephard, Fredrik Lagergren, Karl Piltz, Mats Lindeskog, and Thomas Pugh

Project homepage

This project explores the functional strategies of trees in montane rainforest in Rwanda and uses the LPJ-GUESS dynamic vegetation model to convert these into assessments of tree performance, with the ultimate aim of exploring how tree diversity affects forst resilience. The modelling component of the project is combined with fieldwork at the RwandaTree experiment with a focus on leaf functional strategies. 

Funder: VR Swedish Research Council 

Dates: 2022-2025

People involved: Alexandra Pongracz, Stefan Olin, and Thomas Pugh

Lucat

The Arctic terrestrial methane debate is strongly biased by results from carbon-rich wetlands, which are methane-emission hotspots. Less attention has been given to the carbon-poor mineral soils, cover almost 87% of the Arctic.
The terrestrial methane budget is determined by two contrasting processes, production and consumption, both occurring within the soil. In previous work we have shown a consistent increase (23-27%) in methane consumption when ecosystems have adapted to a future climate (year 2050-2080). In this proposal, we will challenge the emissions-dominated view of the Arctic, and test if our results can be generalized to a circumpolar context.With global warming, Arctic plant communities respond rapidly, leading to taller plants, increased biomass, and changed composition. These changes will lead to increased oxygen availability in surface soils (e.g. increased evapotranspiration), a process critical for the methane budget. Methane is produced during anoxic conditions in water-saturated soils, while the aerated surface soil is occupied by methane-consuming bacteria, strongly reducing emissions or even absorbing atmospheric methane, processes often hidden in measurements.We hypothesize that changes in plant communities and climate conditions will significantly increase the methane consumption rates, increasing the Arctic sink strength. This represents an important negative climate feedback, potentially giving us the time needed to reach a climate neutral lifestyle.

Dates: 2022-2025

People involved: Paul Miller

Lucat

Here we develop a deep neural network for simulating tree mortality in major European tree species and implement it in LPJ-GUESS to explore the potential to improve simulations of tree mortality. 

Funder: ETH Zürich

Dates: 2022-2024

People involved: Adrian Gustafsson and Thomas Pugh

Lucat

MoASVeF will improve vegetation feedback in Earth system models by considering the sub-seasonal dynamics of vegetation phenology and its biophysical properties. It will take advantage of the multiple high-resolution satellite observations and field measurement to improve the model's parameters in controlling vegetation dynamics and feedback over the semi-arid regions. This interdisciplinary research project will facilitate the application of satellite observations and the development of ecosystem and climate modelling. It will improve the understanding of sub-seasonal changes in biophysical properties in response to climate variation based on the generated high-resolution satellite-based biophysical parameter datasets, and improve the Earth system model’s ability to simulate seasonal climate variability by considering sub-seasonal vegetation feedbacks. The improved methods and datasets will advance climate services with improved estimates of climate risk under future climate in Africa.

Dates: 2022-2024

People involved: Minchao Wu, Torbern Tagesson, Zheng Duan, and Zhanzhang Cai

Lucat

Arctic PASSION

Arctic PASSION is an EU-funded H2020 project that runs until the end of 2025. Its goal is to develop and implement a cohesive, integrated Arctic observing system. Lund University is participating in several work packages. Research that makes use of LPJ-GUESS is part of work package 3 and focuses on enhancing monitoring and forecasting capabilities for the Arctic using models. In this context, we will use Quantitative Network Design (QND) (e.g. Kaminski et al., 2017) to constrain LPJ-GUESS with observations and evaluate how this reduces uncertainties in specific target quantities. For example, observations might include soil temperature measurements from boreholes in permafrost regions, while the target quantities of interest are the active layer depth (ALD) and the CO2/CH4 fluxes. By applying QND to LPJ-GUESS, we aim to answer questions like: Would adding additional borehole at certain locations improve our understanding of the ALD dynamics and subsequent emissions of greenhouse gases?

Dates: 2021-2025

People involved: Margot Knapen and Marko Scholze

Lucat

Project homepage

The project ‘Plant Feedback Underneath’ is funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) Starting Grant. Its primary goal is to model root dynamics in Arctic tundra ecosystems and quantify vegetation feedback in response to regional and global climate change. Root dynamics play a critical role in Arctic tundra ecosystems. Roots constitute a significant portion of the total plant biomass and mediate essential ecosystem functions, including resource partitioning (such as water and nutrient fluxes), which in turn affects species competition. Despite the importance of root dynamics, our understanding of Arctic ecosystems remains limited due to a lack of comprehensive data. Unlike above-ground ecosystem processes, the regional and global implications of root dynamics on the carbon cycle have received less attention. To address this gap, the project aims to develop an advanced root module within a dynamic vegetation model. This module will accurately represent root dynamics and their responses to key Arctic processes, including permafrost thawing, summer warming, and snowfall. The updated model will be applied to Pan-Arctic ecosystems and integrated into regional and global Earth system models. The resulting insights will be crucial for understanding Arctic ecosystem resilience in the face of climate change. Additionally, they will shed light on opportunities and challenges related to Arctic ecosystem services and sustainable evelopment in the region. 

Funder: Swedish Research Council (VR)

Dates: 2021-2025

People involved: Wenxin Zhang

Lucat

PolarRES

The overall objective of PolarRES is to provide new insights into key local-regional scale physical and chemical processes for atmosphere-ocean-ice interactions in the Arctic and Antarctic, their responses to, and influence on, projected changes in the global circulation and their implications for society and the environment. PolarRES will zoom into the climate of both Polar regions with state-of-the-art regional climate models (RCMs), run at unprecedented resolutions, to investigate the influence of projected changes in the global circulation on the climate of the Arctic and Antarctic. Polar climates in a global context remains poorly understood and thus climate change projections in Polar regions have large uncertainties and this hampers mitigation and adaptation efforts. PolarRES proposes an innovative ‘storyline’ approach and novel analysis methods to address these challenges. We will accomplish this by exploiting the recent CMIP6 global climate model (GCM) projections and novel developments in GCMs such as variable resolution grids. High-resolution regional projections will be co-designed with and exploited by impact modellers to produce impact-relevant projections of future climate change for both Polar regions. PolarRES will combine these high-resolution simulations from state-of-the-art RCMs and next generation fully coupled RCMs with a comprehensive range of existing and novel observations (e.g. YOPP and MOSAiC) including satellite products from relevant projects funded by the ESA Earth Observation Programme. The consortium consists of leading European groups in the areas of polar-lower latitude teleconnections, polar oceanography, meteorology, climatology, biogeochemistry, global climate modelling, and regional climate modelling in the Arctic and Antarctic. PolarRES will contribute to the EU Strategy on Climate Action and EU strategy for international cooperation in R&I.

Funder: European Commission - Horizon Europe

Dates: 2021-2025

People involved: Lars Nieradzik

PolarRES Homepage

Lucat

In this project, we use Earth system model (LPJ-GUESS is a component) simulations to investigate the impacts of large-scale photovoltaic solar farms envisioned over the global drylands (the Sahara Desert, Southwest USA, Central Asia, Northwest China, Central Australia). These solar farm simulations are designed and analyzed for an improved understanding of the forcing mechanisms of massive desert solar farms which can be helpful for the future site selection of large-scale solar energy facilities.

Global dryland solar farm impacts Figure

Figure 2. adapted from Long, Lu et al. (2024). Global solar potential (PVpot) affected by solar farms in four dryland solar farm simulations. Map of annual (ANN), winter(DJF), and summer(JJA) global PVpot response, highlighting the impacts of hypothetical solar farms placed at Central Asia, Australia, Southwestern US, and Northwestern China areas.

Funder: FORMAS

Dates: 2021-2024

People involved: Ben Smith, Paul Miller, and Zhengyao Lu

Lucat

Carbon dioxide (CO2), a key ingredient in plant photosynthesis, continues to accumulate in the atmosphere, driven by human emissions. Rising CO2 concentration impacts plant productivity and ecosystem carbon storage, interacting with climate, soil resources and other drivers. A notable knowledge gap concerns the role of phosphorus, crucial as a constraint on plant productivity and ecosystem function in many tropical and temperate forests, with global implications. The Eucalyptus free-air CO2 enrichment (EucFACE) experiment, deployed in a warm-temperate evergreen forest stand in Australia, is the only currently operational field experiment in which an intact forest ecosystem growing on P-deficient soils is exposed to elevated CO2 concentrations (eCO2), necessary to capture ecosystem-scale responses and feedbacks. Measurements of plant and soil responses to multi-factor CO2 and P addition treatments at EucFACE will help close the gap on P × CO2 interactions and deliver new mechanistic knowledge in models of the global carbon cycle and its responses to climate change and rising CO2.

Funder: Swedish Research Council (VR)

Dates: 2021-2024

People involved: Ben Smith and David Wårlind

Lucat

The continued warming has led to Arctic greening. However, it is still controversy about the greening trend and its feedback. We will investigate the spatiotemporal patterns in the trend and drivers of panarctic greening in recent decades using a physically-based vegetation index and predict its future trend and feedback using Earth system models. The specific aims are: (1) to investigate the Arctic growing season variations and their relationships to temperature, precipitation, and seasonal snow cover over circumpolar arctic region (>60°N); (2) to investigate the changes of seasonal maximum vegetation growth, annual total growth, and their relationships to temperature and precipitation in preceding seasons; and (3) to study the spring growth rate and acclimation of Arctic vegetation to warming and to investigate the controls of other climatic factors on spring growth; (4) to predict biogeophysical feedbacks to the climate system using process-based Earth system models and satellite-derived seasonal changes of land surface albedo, soil moisture, and evapotranspiration. The project involves intensive remote sensing data processing, biophysical indicator development, statistical analysis, and process-based ecosystem modeling. The project aspires to contribute to knowledge concerning arctic ecosystem responses to climatic warming, their relationship to environmental drivers and impacts of vegetation feedbacks.

Funder: Swedish National Space Agency

Dates: 2021-2024

People involved: Hanna Marsh, Hongxiao Jin, Wenxin Zhang, and Zheng Duan

Lucat

The necessity for long-term data and comprehension of the effects of clear-cut on the greenhouse gas (GHG) budget is crucial for evaluations and policy suggestions for forest management. We will deliver a rich dataset of below and above ground measures for a full GHG budget from Norunda as forest and as clear-cut. Using this dataset, we will calibrate the LPJ-GUESS ecosystem model and analyse scenarios of alternative reforestation strategies under climate change scenarios. The main goal is to enhance the quantification and minimize uncertainties of the sink and source terms for areas with intensive forest management at both national and regional scales. Our findings will facilitate strategic investments in the forestry sector, aiming to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement or the even more ambitious Swedish climate mitigation targets.

Dates: 2018-2024

People involved: Anna Maria Jönsson, Lars Eklundh, Marko Scholze, and Natascha Kljun

Lucat

EC-Earth Projects

OPTIMESM

OptimESM will provide new and policy-relevant knowledge on the consequences of reaching or exceeding different levels of global warming, including the risk of rapid change in key Earth system phenomena and the regional impacts arising both from the level of global warming and the occurrence of abrupt changes. The new climate models will combine high resolution with an unprecedented description of key physical and biochemical processes. OptimESM will develop new emission and land-use scenarios extending to the year 2300, including ones that realise the Paris Agreement, and others that temporarily or permanently overshoot the Paris targets. Using these scenarios, OptimESM will deliver long-term projections that will increase our understanding of the risk of triggering potential tipping points in the climate system regarding ice sheets, sea ice, ocean circulation, marine ecosystems, permafrost, and terrestrial ecosystems. 

Funder: European Commission - Horizon Europe

Dates: 2023-2027

People involved: David Wårlind, Lars Nieradzik, and Paul Miller

Lucat

Project homepage

PerClimX

PERClimX seeks to bridge the gap in understanding the interplay between ecosystem recovery after stress and climate extremes. By developing a process-based post-stress hydraulic recovery scheme within a coupled Earth system model, the project aims to realistically represent vegetation feedback. This improved representation will enhance our ability to capture carbon and climate variability under extreme climatic conditions. Recently available field measurements from the tropics will be used to calibrate the simulated post-stress vegetation dynamics by LPJ-GUESS. The updated Earth system model will then be used to assess future changes in ecosystems and climate services. This includes examining biomass stability, drought duration and intensity, and the regional carbon budget under various climate change scenarios.

Dates: 2023-2026

People involved: Minchao Wu, Thomas Pugh, and Yuzuo Zhu

Lucat

GreenFeedBack

The exchange of GHGs between the atmosphere and the northern oceans and coastal areas, as well as Arctic and Subarctic terrestrial ecosystems, are very sensitive to temperature changes due to the melting of sea ice and glaciers, thawing of permafrost, and changes in snow cover. Over the past 100 years, the surface ocean has warmed by more than 0.7°C on average. This warming is enhanced at high latitudes in the northern hemisphere, and future warming is projected to be strongest in these regions.
The overall objective of GreenFeedBack is to enhance our understanding of key processes of the terrestrial biosphere – freshwater – ocean continuum in surface-atmosphere GHG exchange, the connection between them, and the impacts from human pressures. We will primarily focus on enhancing our understanding of the GHG exchange processes, biogeochemical cycles and feedback mechanisms in high latitude terrestrial and freshwater systems, marine shelves and ocean areas and thereby advance the process-based representation of ecosystems in Earth System Models (ESM), allowing for more certain climate change projections from which climate mitigation and adaptation strategies can be evaluated.

Funder: European Commission - Horizon Europe

Dates: 2022-2026

People involved: David Wårlind, Lars Nieradzik, Minchao Wu, and Paul Miller

Lucat

Project homepage

RESCUE

The RESCUE project will improve knowledge and understanding in area c) of this call: “Climate and Earth System responses to climate neutrality and net negative emissions” by pursuing two overall objectives: 1) Quantify the climate and Earth system responses to pathways achieving climate neutrality by Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) deployment with and without temperature overshoot, and 2) Assess the potential role of CDR in reducing net GHG emissions, as well as its potential environmental risks and co-benefits. RESCUE will expand existing knowledge on CDR methods to design a suite of new global temperature stabilization scenarios at several target values to achieve the first objective. New model developments will deliver improved climate projections with explicit representation of CDR portfolios for these scenarios. The analyses will be devoted to finding suitable pathways to climate neutrality considering multiple aspects of the Earth system response: mean climate and extremes, sea-level rise, global carbon cycling, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. Particular attention will be paid to the reversibility of induced changes by comparing scenarios with and without temperature overshoot. The second objective will be achieved by analyses assessing various factors determining overall effectiveness, impacts and co-benefits of CDR portfolios. These factors include CDR-specific CO2 uptake, CDR-induced biogeophysical climate feedbacks, CDR-derived non-CO2 radiative forcers, and the interaction between socio-economic and environmental impacts (e.g., biodiversity). Moreover, a dedicated analysis will provide key criteria for developing a monitoring system for the effectiveness of CDR portfolio deployments and their potential side effects. Stakeholders will be closely engaged throughout the project to ensure policy relevance and final update of the results which will be made freely available via existing climate services. 

Funder: European Commission - Horizon Europe

Dates: 2022-2026

People involved: David Wårlind, Lars Nieradzik, Mats Lindeskog, Paul Miller, Stefan Olin, and Thomas Pugh

Lucat

Project homepage

HYway project logo

HYway will studying the climate impacts of large-scale hydrogen usage. While not a greenhouse gas itself, hydrogen emitted into the atmosphere will chemically react with and increase other greenhouse gases, such as methane, ozone and stratospheric water vapor, causing global warming. HYway will provide critical information to policymakers and stakeholders on how hydrogen can best be utilized to reduce fossil fuel emissions - allowing them to make informed decisions about the role of hydrogen in the transition to a low-carbon economy. To achieve this goal, HYway will develop innovative hydrogen emissions inventories and scenarios, estimate impacts using a wide range of models, and develop novel flux quantification methodologies.

 

Funder: European Commission - Horizon Europe

Dates: 2024-2028

People involved: David Wårlind, Paul Miller

Project homepage

RCA-GUESS Projects

In ForestPaths we seek to improve capabilities to simulate the interactions of climate change and forest management in European forests and then apply the improved models to explore the consequences of different policy pathways for forests and the forest sector. In this project we use both the LPJ-GUESS dynamic vegetation model and RCA-GUESS regional climate model.  

Dates: 2022-2027

People involved: Anna Maria Jönsson, Annemarie Eckes-Shephard, Mats Lindeskog, Stefan Olin, and Thomas Pugh

Project homepage

The project is funded by the Swedish National Space Agency. Both top-down approaches (using satellite and aerial images) and bottom-up approaches (relying on flux measurements and process-based models) have revealed that the Arctic is experiencing increased greening. However, there are consistencies and divergences in the drivers and trends of Arctic greening across different approaches. These discrepancies arise due to variations in data scales and gaps in our process-based understanding and data interpretation. The primary objective of this project is to quantify the spatial and temporal characteristics of Arctic greening and browning trends and their underlying drivers. To achieve this, we will analyze a series of remote sensing products. Additionally, we aim to enhance the regional Earth model to better simulate vegetation feedbacks within the climate system. Our approach involves using the plant phenology index (PPI)-derived Arctic phenology and vegetation productivity, along with satellite-derived albedo and latent heat flux. By evaluating a regional Earth system model, we seek to improve predictions related to vegetation responses under future climatic warming scenarios in both the Arctic and boreal regions.

Dates: 2022-2027

People involved: Hanna Marsh and Wenxin Zhang

Lucat

Finished Projects

In this FORMAS project we use LPJ-GUESS to an ecosystem model to calculate the impacts of climate and forest management on ecosystem services, forestry economy and risk taking. We explore the role of forest owners in contributing to climate solutions and fulfillment of national environmental objectives during the transition towards a fossil-free society.

Dates: 2020-2024

People involved: Anna Maria Jönsson, Fredrik Lagergren, John Bergkvist, Maj-Lena Linderson, and Paul Miller

Lucat

In this project, we use Earth system model (LPJ-GUESS is a component) simulations to show that large-scale photovoltaic solar farms envisioned over the Sahara Desert would reduce surface albedo, leading to increased rainfall and vegetation cover. However, adverse remote effects resulting from atmospheric teleconnections could offset such regional benefits, such as a redistribution of precipitation causing Amazon droughts and forest degradation, and global surface temperature rise and sea-ice loss, particularly over the Arctic due to increased polarward heat transport, and northward expansion of deciduous forests in the Northern Hemisphere. 

Sahara solar farm impacts Figure

Figure 3. The EC-Earth simulated vegetation cover in response to the installation of large-scale solar farms in the Sahara (black dots), and more than half of the desert is covered by grassland. The chart on the left shows the forcing mechanism of how the climate-vegetation feedbacks can amplify the solar farm impacts in this region. 

Dates: 2019-2020

People involved: Ben Smith, Paul Miller, and Zhengyao Lu

Lucat

As described in the novel The English Patient, what is now the world’s largest Sahara Desert was extensively covered by shrubland and grassland 5,000 to 11,000 years ago. Marine sediments indicate that during that period Sahara was about 10 times as wet as today, dotted with large and small lakes and the vegetated area extended as north as 31°N, thus created a “Green Sahara”.
The Green Sahara was a direct result of African monsoonal climate responses to periodic variations in the Earth´s orbit around the Sun. During the green Sahara period the dust emissions were 70 to 80% lower than today. More interestingly, paleoclimate data also show that the beginning and termination of the Green Sahara period were abrupt, occurring within decades to centuries.The project aims to use an Earth System Model (ESM) to investigate how do the local and global climate response to the greening of Sahara. We will assess the different role played by vegetation and dust in climate change. We will simulate a 2000 years’ evolution of mid-Holocene climate driven by slowly changed insolation in the ESM and to observe if the climate-vegetation interaction would cause an abrupt change in Sahara as suggested by the paleoclimate data. These simulations on one hand will enhance our understanding on the dramatic change in ecosystem happened in the past and on the other hand will provide a very useful test for the ESM during a transient climate like future climate projections.

Simulating the Green Sahara - Figure

Figure 4. adapted from Lu et al. (2018). Maps of dominant high and low vegetation types. Simulated (a, c–d) vegetation types; high veg on the left, low veg on the right for the pre-Industrial (PI) benchmark and two mid-Holocene scenario simulations.  (b) Reconstructed vegetation types (Larrasoaña et al., 2013) and reconstructed tree line and grass line (black solid and dashed lines, respectively; Hély et al., 2014).

Funder: Swedish Research Council (VR)

Dates: 2018-2021

People involved: David Wårlind, Lars Nieradzik, Paul Miller, and Zhengyao Lu

Lucat

The terrestrial biosphere plays a key role in mitigating climate change by sequestering the anthropogenic carbon emissions in the atmosphere. The projected change in biosphere-atmosphere carbon exchange remains highly uncertain due to competing effects of elevated CO2 concentration and the accompanying climate forcing. Studying how the carbon balance changed in the past cold and warm climate transitions can help to constrain these uncertainties. We perform LPJ-GUESS model simulations to reproduce the vegetation patterns and terrestrial carbon variations in these climate states, which are consistent with paleo-vegetation and carbon cycle-related reconstructions. We further investigate separately the climate forcing effects (precipitation, temperature and CO2 concentration) and take into account the different land-sea distributions.

Paleo Figure

Figure 5. adapted from Lu et al. (2019). (a–c) Maps of dominant vegetation types for the pre-industrial (PI), Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), and Pliocene simulated by LPJ-GUESS . Circles represent reconstructed biomes. (d–f) Latitude distribution of biome records (blue histogram) in 5° steps. Red curves show the distribution of biome records matched with simulation results.

Funder: LUCCI and MERGE

Dates: 2008-2019

People involved: Ben Smith, David Wårlind, Lars Nieradzik, Paul  Miller, and Zhengyao Lu