Measurement and Modeling of Carbon and Woody Resource Responses to Climate and Disturbance in Continental Africa

Niall P Hanan, South Dakota State University, niall.hanan@sdstate.edu (Presenter)
Lara Prihodko, South Dakota State University, lara.prihodko@sdstate.edu
Rebecca McKeown, Colorado State University, becky.mckeown@colostate.edu
Gabriela Bucini, University of Vermont, gbucini@uvm.edu
Andrew Tredennick, Colorado State University, atredenn@nrel.colostate.edu

Interactions among climate change and ecosystem processes (plant demographics, tree-grass interactions, grazers, browsers, fire and nitrogen) challenge our ability to predict future carbon stocks in Africa and other tropical regions. Our work indicates that Africa has a near zero decade-scale carbon balance, but that climate fluctuations induce sizeable variability in ecosystem productivity, and these changes then impact the occurrence and intensity of African savanna fires, with significant impacts on inter-annual variability in global atmospheric [CO2] and other pyrogenic emissions. Vegetation dynamics, and the availability of woody resources and fodder, also has profound implications for the livelihoods and socioeconomic wellbeing of Africa’s agricultural and pastoral communities. We present remote sensing based woody cover and biomass assessments for sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) using a combination of optical and radar datasets, and describe a simplified, low-dimensional model of African ecosystems designed to accommodate remote sensing data-assimilation, and use it to explore carbon, fuel-wood and fodder dynamics in Africa in response to climate variability, fire and other anthropogenically determined disturbance factors.

Presentation Type:  Poster

Session:  Global Change Impact & Vulnerability   (Tue 11:30 AM)

Associated Project(s): 

• Hanan, Niall: African Carbon Exchange II: a systems approach for diagnosis and prediction of carbon, vegetation and disturbance dynamics in the natural and anthropogenic grasslands, savannas and forests of Africa ...details

Poster Location ID: 203