Where plants grow

Plants influence climate by modifying the exchange of energy, water, momentum, and carbon between the land surface and the atmosphere. Different types of plants have different characteristics for influencing the these fluxes, e.g. forests are darker in color and absorb more sunlight, have higher productivity (carbon uptake), and have higher rates of water flux than grasslands, croplands, or the tundra.

We have demonstrated that changes which plants grow where can thus directly influence climate locally through at least four different pathways (sunlight, water exchange, heat exchange, and cloud cover) as well as globally – where changes in vegetation cover influence large-scale atmospheric circulation and dynamics, with resulting impacts on ecosystems living far away from the initial perturbations. We have formalized this latter concept as “ecoclimate teleconnections” —a global-scale perspective of the connectivity between ecosystems that was not previously appreciated by the community.

The primary tool we use for this work is the Community Earth System Model. In addition to the community-developed components of the model, we have developed a highly simplified land surface option in collaboration with Gordon Bonan, called the “ Simple Land Interface Model”, or SLIM for short. SLIM opperates as an option in the CESM framework, and we are working on making it available as a convenient compset.

Collaborators on this work include Gordon Bonan at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, John Chiang and Inez Fung at the University of California, Berkeley.

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation.