CREAF

The current ongoing global change is affecting forest ecosystems in multiple ways, including changes in climatic conditions, disturbance regimes and land uses. Therefore, there is a compelling need to develop accessible, robust and accurate mechanistic modeling tools that allow us to anticipate possible future changes in forest ecosystems at different scales. However, important challenges remain regarding the processes involved in drought-induced tree mortality and how to represent taxonomic and functional diversity in large-scale simulations. Today, great research efforts are focused on improving the performance of global terrestrial vegetation dynamics models, while vegetation dynamics models operating at finer scales are underdeveloped.

Goals

Promote the use of process-based modeling frameworks to assess the impacts of climate change on forest ecosystems and associated services, at scales between the forest stand and the region.

Actions

We propose to carry out this project combining technical and scientific contributions. On the technical side, we propose to integrate parts of existing models into a modular forest modeling framework; and generate inputs and parameters suitable for different countries from the information contained in national forest inventories and global databases of plant functional characteristics. From a scientific point of view, we propose to use the modeling framework developed to evaluate climate and management scenarios on forest dynamics, as well as services related to water and carbon in a Mediterranean region.

Proyecto PID2021-126679OB-I00 financiado por MCIN/ AEI /10.13039/501100011033/ y por FEDER Una manera de hacer Europa