Petter Pilesjö
Professor
Linking distributed hydrological processes with ecosystem vegetation dynamics and carbon cycling: Modelling studies in a subarctic catchment of northern Sweden
Author
Summary, in English
In this thesis, we aim to overcome this limitation by implementing spatial topographical indices into a state-of-the-art dynamic ecosystem model, LPJ-GUESS, and to incorporate water and carbon (mainly dissolved organic carbon, DOC) interactions between the grid cells. Modelling approaches and algorithms developed in this thesis were applied to study the subarctic Stordalen catchment, located in northern Sweden, and to explore the potential influence on the model’s hydrological and ecological estimations. Extensive sets of observation data were used for model evaluation throughout.
We proposed a distributed hydrological (DH) approach to dynamically simulate water flow from cell to cell within the catchment and compared the hydrological and ecological impacts resulting from different flow routing algorithms. The results indicate an improved accuracy of runoff estimation when using the proposed DH scheme in the Stordalen catchment. They also show that the choice of flow algorithm can have strong impacts on water and carbon flux estimations in this region. Furthermore, a complete estimation of the catchment carbon budget was assessed using our developed model. We found that the catchment is a carbon sink at present and could become a stronger sink in the near future, a result which is, however, very dependent on future atmospheric CO2 concentrations and methane (CH4) emissions from the peatlands. Additionally, the model was further extended to dynamically model soil water DOC and the lateral transport of DOC across the landscape. The modelled outputs suggest that DOC production and mineralization largely contribute to DOC fluxes and that wet fen peatland is and will be a hotspot for DOC export.
In conclusion, this thesis demonstrates the feasibility of implementing topographical indices into LPJ-GUESS to describe water flows, and the importance of considering spatial heterogeneity in hydrological conditions when modelling carbon dynamics at high latitudes. Furthermore, the integration of vertical and horizontal carbon fluxes at high spatial resolutions can be used to provide more accurate estimations of a complete carbon budget and can dynamically simulate the fate of different carbon components in response to climate change.
Department/s
- Dept of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science
- MERGE: ModElling the Regional and Global Earth system
Publishing year
2014
Language
English
Full text
Document type
Dissertation
Publisher
Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University
Topic
- Physical Geography
Keywords
- Carbon cycling
- Water cycling
- Hydrological modelling
- Ecosystem modelling
- Subarctic ecosystems
- Climate change
Status
Published
Supervisor
- Petter Pilesjö
- Paul Miller
ISBN/ISSN/Other
- ISBN: 978-91-85793-44-0
Defence date
16 December 2014
Defence time
13:00
Defence place
Världen auditorium, Geocentrum I, Sölvegatan 10, 223 62, Lund Sweden
Opponent
- Eleanor Blyth (Dr.)