Interdisciplinary Research of Carbon and Water Cycles in the Terrestrial Ecosystems of China
Hanqin
Tian, Auburn University, tianhan@auburn.edu
(Presenting)
Jerry
Melillo, Marine Biological Laboratory, jmelillo@mbl.edu
Steve
Running, University of Montana, swr@ntsg.umt.edu
Jiyuan
Liu, IGSNRR, CAS, liujy@igsnrr.ac.cn
Ranga
Myneni, Boston University, rmyneni@bu.edu
For millennia, Chinese people have altered the landscape in many ways in pursuit of food, fuel and fiber. China’s expanding economy, which is the fastest growing in the world along with continued population growth, will lead to continued land transformations in the next decades, including dramatic urbanization. While we have a qualitative sense that land transformations across China have affected and will continue to affect the ability of China’s ecosystems to provide people with essential goods and services, our challenge now is to quantify exactly how the provision of key goods and services has changed. Here we have developed a partnership between Chinese and US scientists to combine remote-sensing data and a set of ecosystem simulation models to quantify the consequences of land transformations on productivity, carbon sequestration and water yield in terrestrial ecosystems. We document the patterns of land-use change across China in the past 300 years. We also examine how ecosystem goods and services have changed as a result of multiple stresses and interactions among those stresses including land-use change, climate variability, atmospheric composition (carbon dioxide and tropospheric ozone), precipitation chemistry (nitrogen composition), and fire frequency using estimates of gross primary production, net primary production, carbon storage, evapotranspiration and water yield from factorial simulation experiments with three terrestrial ecosystem models (Biome-BGC, DLEM and TEM). Model results are compared to field-based estimates of carbon fluxes and pools, evapotranspiration and stream flow. Here we present the key results from a collaborative project, funded by NASA Interdisciplinary Science Program.