Plant Ecology Modelling - Current Projects

Trait-Tweaks: Exploring Ecological Realism in Ecosystem Models under Future Climate Conditions

Funder: Research ireland

Land surface models (LSMs) have made significant advances in incorporating biologically realistic processes but are still far from adequately representing plant responses to changes in climate or atmospheric CO2. Plants are fundamentally plastic, and respond flexibly to their environment, both at short timescales through plasticity and across multiple generations through evolution and competition, processes currently not incorporated in LSMs. Trait-Tweaks will bridge this gap by creating the first model to include theoretical concepts from biogeochemistry and evolutionary ecology. The project brings together complementary data sources from existing experimental networks, and global trait databases. Large datasets of plant traits provide a wealth of information but are often limited to statistical analyses. trait-tweaks will shift the way we work with plant traits by providing process understanding and testable hypotheses for global trait distributions.

Climate + biodiversity + water Co-centre

Funder: Research Ireland/DAERA/UKRI

Climate + biodiversity + water is a joint research centre between academic institutions in Ireland, Northern Ireland and Great Britain as well as multiple industry partners. We aim to tackle the joint global crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and water degradation from both a fundamental science point of view and applied and policy perspective. The PEM group is actively involved in Platform 1: Projections and working on future predictions of the carbon cycle under changes in climate and land use and novel ways to integrate biodiversity into land surface models.

PhenoShift: Phenology as a growth and survival strategy in a changing climate

Funder: Trinity Research Doctorate internal funding

Leaf phenology - the timing of leaf on and leaf off - is still largely viewed as phenomenon driven by temperature. However, leaf seasonality is not restricted to ecosystems where temperature is the main seasonal driver, it is a process taking place in most ecosystems, including tropical and subtropical seasonally more or less dry systems. The projects integrates new developments in QUINCY with data from remote sensing, eddy covariance, phenocams and citizen science.

Grassland carbon dynamics and management in a next generation land surface model

Funder: iCRAG SFI research centre

Grasslands are one of the major global ecotypes, both in terms of area and carbon storage capacity and can also be significant sources of other greenhouse gases due to management for human use (e.g. grazing, fertilisation). This project will investigate how grassland carbon, nutrient and water cycles change globally under future conditions and how climate and management practices interact to alter these cycles. The project builds realistic physiological and ecological knowledge specific to herbaceous plants into QUINCY, looking at processes such as turnover and reproductive growth and differentitation between annual and perennial ecosystems.