National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory
National Aeronautics and Space Administration Jet Propulsion Laboratory California Institute of Technology Simulating functional diversity of European natural forests along climatic gradients submitted by Fabian Schneider Functional Richness Functional Divergence Functional Evenness Lund-Potsdam-Jena managed Land of Flexible Individual Traits LPJm. L-FIT Concept of assigning flexible individual parameters to tree individuals of a specific woody PFT (Step 2 + 3) including LES (leaf-) and SES (stem economics) plant traits. Relevance: Functional diversity FD is a key control of the stability and adaptability of ecosystems under climate change. Ecosystem FD can be derived from the diversity of morphological and/or physiological plant traits, which can reveal ecosystem functions such as plant productivity, transpiration or nutrient cycling. Modeling FD can advance our understanding of spatial patterns of plant traits at the continental scale. Problem: We have a limited understanding of how plant traits are linked to ecosystem functions at landscape scale, and very few dynamic global vegetation models can predict interactions among individual plants and distributions of plant functional traits. Method: We adopted the existing LPJm. L-FIT dynamic global vegetation model for Europe by eliminating both bioclimatic limits of plant functional types (PFTs) and replacing prescribed values of functional traits to PFTs with emergent values under influence of environmental filtering and competition. We quantified functional richness, divergence and evenness at European scale from simulated individual plant traits. Findings: The new model reproduces local trait distributions and observed productivity, biomass and tree height of European natural forests. We find FD resulting from both environmental and competitive filtering. Pan-European richness, divergence and evenness demonstrate the influence of climate gradients as well as intra- and inter-PFT competition from life-history strategies, disturbances and tree demography. Kirsten Thonicke, Maik Billing, . . . , Fabian D. Schneider et al. (2020) Journal of Biogeography. https: //doi. org/10. 1111/jbi. 13809
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