GCTE Activity 2.2 - Plans for 1998

Summary of Task leaders meeting in Barcelona 17/3/98 and perspectives for 1998

Task leaders gave a summary of advancement since San Diego and plans for 1998.

Task 2.2.1.(Sandra Díaz & Sue McIntyre) held a workshop in Montpellier prior to the Science conference. The thirty participants worked on the elaboration of the operational plan. The three essentail outcomes were

1. the development of a core trait list to be used across studies of PFTs for response to disturbance
2. a draft of the framework to be used for comparison of PFT classifications within and across different environments (esp. climates) and disturbance types
3. a plan for the hierarchical operation of the network; three disturbance types were selected for closer focus and parallel operation:

• grazing, across a range of climates and continents
• land use change in the old world (Europe and neighbouring countries)
• fire in woody vegetation across a range of climates and continents

A detailed summary of the workshop will be circulated.

1998 will be spent developing the 3 parallel disturbance networks. Additional activity will concern the completion of the core trait list and continued development of the comparison framework. An e-mail group, now including over 70 scientists worldwide, was set up at the end of 1997 and will form the basis for further discussions and specific working groups.

The next milestones planned for 1999 are:

• mid 1999: separate workshops of the land use change and fire groups
• 19-23 July 1999: International Rangelands conference, Townsville Australia, coupled with a workshop of the grazing group where leaders of the land use change and fire groups will also report progress (location to be confirmed)

Task 2.2.2. (Bob Gardner) is still in the development stage.

A workshop is planned for June 22-24 at the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research (PIK) to investigate how to include dynamic and interactive disturbance components into current DGVM models. This workshop will concentrate on fire as an initial disturbance to include into DGVMs, with special attention to information required (i.e. the biogeochemical and hydrological cycle, nutrient status, etc.) and the problem of making reliable predictions across temporal and spatial scales.

Requests with US AID for funding a fire model comparison workshop in Indonesia were unsuccessful. Due to present uncertainties about the Indonesian political situation, the plan is postponed.

A proposal for further developments of the EMBYR model including the ability to estimate changes in C fluxes as a result of changing fire regimes with climate has been submitted to the U.S. TECO.

A proposal to NCEAS will be prepared for the support of workshops to carry out the model comparisons (see ‘General Activity strategy’).

An additional workshop s being organised by Mike Flannigan and Brad Hawkes (Canadian Forest Service) on ‘Landscape fire models for northern and western forests’. It is proposed as one of the workshops in the series outlined in the operational plan for assessing the applicability of fire models across different ecosystems and spatial and temporal scales.

Task 2.2.3. (George Malanson) held a small workshop in Iowa City in December 1997. The group is progressing on developing algorithms that explore the interactions between dispersal via different vectors (using improved representations of movements by wind and aniamls) and landscape pattern (as modelled using neutral landscape maps). A further workshop will be held in 1999 along with the conference of the International Association of Landscape Ecology (29/7 - 3/8, Snowmass, Colorado) . A proposal has been submitted to TECO to cover further modelling research and the workshop.

Contacts will be enhanced with Jim Clark’s group in order to advance the data-based parameterization of dispersal kernels.

Task 2.2.4 (Mike Apps & Indy Burke) is about to start a comparative analysis of point vs area data for NPP in Canada, U.S., and Siberia boreal forests in order to test the non-linearity hypothesis. Contacts with the EUROFLU / MEDEFMU networks are sought to expand the analysis to other biomes.

A carbon workshop will be organised by Mike Apps later this year (Mike: can you please provide details?)

A new application has been submitted to NCEAS to hold an Activity 4.2. workshop aimed at the development of a detailed operational plan.

A workshop on generic landscape models will be organised by Sandra Lavorel and Ian Noble later this year (date and location TBA; to be proposed to NCEAS - see below)

General Activity strategy

• A twice-yearly newsletter (January and July) will be circulated to the whole network in order to give update on progress in different Tasks and calendars of events (esp. workshops).
• The Activity Web page is presently being set up on the CEFE-CNRS site. Bob Gardner and George Malanson have agreed to rapidly develop their own pages (Tasks 2 and 3) at their sites, which will be linked up to the main page. Task 1 will be managed on the CEFE site.
• All Tasks but Task 1 are intending to take advantage of the IALE international conference (29 July - 3 August 1999) to run workshops.
• At the present stage of development of the Activity, and with regard to NCEAS’ recent desire to fund substantial, continuing activities rather than punctual workshops, I am proposing to put together a proposal to cover a series of workshops for the whole Activity. The advantage of this strategy is 1) that of having an integrated ‘backbone plan’, and 2) to try to have a solution to the chronic workshop funding ache at once.

A sketch of the activities that could be proposed as part of that package are:

• generic landscape models
• workshop1 Nov./Dec. 98: model design
• workshop 2 / working group August 99 (post IALE): simulation experiments and synthesis
• fire model comparison
• workshop 1 Fall 98: Workshop for initiation of model comparison activity - or will that be run in SE Asia?
• postdoctoral fellow based at NCEAS + funded to travel to main fire modeling bases (Canada, U.S., Australia); duration? Task: to compare fire models and assess their ability to predict fire effects for multiple ecosystems and across broad spatial and temporal scales
• workshop 2 July 99 (pre IALE) or August (post IALE): framework for comparisons. Special emphasis of workshop will be the evaluation of data uncertainties on model predictions
• workshop 3 Spring 2000: Joint workshop with Activity 2.3 to linkage landscape-scale fire models (modules) with DGVMs
• plant dispersal and migration modeling
• mid 1998 working group on data analysis and creation of dispersal kernels - this needs to be checked with Jim Clark
• August 1999: workshop to synthesize results on migration model comparisons
• Linking changing landscape pattern and ecosystem function
• workshop 1: along with Activity 4.2 to develop operational plan
• workshop 2: ??
• Final activity workshop Mid 2000: synthesis of results on global change and landscape scale processes