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Mats Lindeskog

Postdoctoral fellow

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Climate and parameter sensitivity and induced uncertainties in carbon stock projections for European forests (using LPJ-GUESS 4.0)

Author

  • Johannes Oberpriller
  • Christine Herschlein
  • Peter Anthoni
  • Almut Arneth
  • Andreas Krause
  • Anja Rammig
  • Mats Lindeskog
  • Stefan Olin
  • Florian Hartig

Summary, in English

Understanding uncertainties and sensitivities of projected ecosystem dynamics under environmental change is of immense value for research and climate change policy. Here, we analyze sensitivities (change in model outputs per unit change in inputs) and uncertainties (changes in model outputs scaled to uncertainty in inputs) of vegetation dynamics under climate change, projected by a state-of-the-art dynamic vegetation model (LPJ-GUESS v4.0) across European forests (the species Picea abies, Fagus sylvatica and Pinus sylvestris), considering uncertainties of both model parameters and environmental drivers. We find that projected forest carbon fluxes are most sensitive to photosynthesis-, water-, and mortality-related parameters, while predictive uncertainties are dominantly induced by environmental drivers and parameters related to water and mortality. The importance of environmental drivers for predictive uncertainty increases with increasing temperature. Moreover, most of the interactions of model inputs (environmental drivers and parameters) are between environmental drivers themselves or between parameters and environmental drivers. In conclusion, our study highlights the importance of environmental drivers not only as contributors to predictive uncertainty in their own right but also as modifiers of sensitivities and thus uncertainties in other ecosystem processes. Reducing uncertainty in mortality-related processes and accounting for environmental influence on processes should therefore be a focus in further model development.

Department/s

  • Dept of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science
  • BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate
  • eSSENCE: The e-Science Collaboration
  • MERGE: ModElling the Regional and Global Earth system

Publishing year

2022-08-30

Language

English

Pages

6495-6519

Publication/Series

Geoscientific Model Development

Volume

15

Issue

16

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Copernicus GmbH

Topic

  • Earth and Related Environmental Sciences

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1991-959X