Project Funding:
2007 - 2010
NRA: 2006 NASA: Interdisciplinary Research in Earth Science
Funded by NASA
Abstract:
This proposal responds to ROSES 2006 A.14 Interdisciplinary Research in Earth Sciences and addresses biodiversity and disturbance in the larch forests of Siberia. This truly interdisciplinary project brings together University and NASA expertise in forest succession modeling (University of Virginia [UVA]), soil processes and cold lands modeling (University of Alaska and Goddard Space Flight Center [GSFC]), forest ecology (UVA, GSFC and Sukachev Institute of Forest [SIF]), remote sensing data analysis (University of Maryland and GSFC) and field measurements (SIF) to reveal the current extent and future changes of the immense larch forests of Siberia and eastern Russia. The hypothesis to be tested is that the historical area of larch dominance in Siberia is transforming into a zone of mixed taiga. In addition, we plan to ascertain whether the already observed evergreen conifer invasion is widespread or limited by specific regional climatic and spatial contexts. We anticipate disturbance by forest fires and insects to play a key role in the rates of the transformation to a more diverse forest communities.
The proposed research approach combines ecosystem modeling and remote sensing to document and extend recent findings by the proposal team that southern Siberian forest species are â€invading†traditional larch forests, and that the implications of these changes are significant to biodiversity and feedbacks to climate. The key effort in this proposed project is the coupling of soil moisture and temperature models to an existing forest simulator already in place for the Northern Eurasian larch forest. Vegetation structure simulating quasi-stable and transforming ecosystems will be derived using the model of forest growth and dynamics constrained by dynamic soil processes including moisture, temperature and nutrients. This is critical to the success of understanding biodiversity because of the prevalence of continuous and discontinuous permafrost underlying soils in the region. The expected changes in forest species diversity in response to observed increases in temperature and related controlling factors over the past three decades and into the future will be examined. Analysis of remote sensing imagery will provide information on current forest type and disturbance history. In addition, forest structure measurements from lidar and high spatial and spectral resolution sensors will be used to initialize and validate the combined forest growth and soil model.
More details may be found in the following project profile(s):
