Impacts of Global Climate Change to Terrestrial and Ocean Ecosystem
- Research Activities in the Ecosystem Change Research Program -
Yoshifumi Yasuoka
Frontier Research System for Global Change (FRSGC)
Tokyo, Japan
The Ecosystem Change Research Program was established as the sixth research program in the FRSGC, and has started its research activities last year. The major mission of the program is to understand and to develop models on the mechanisms how climate change affects ecosystems and how ecosystems respond to climate change.
The phenomena relating to the ecosystem, especially to terrestrial ecosystem, have given us an impression of local or regional issues rather than a global issue. There have been, however, found the scientific facts that global changes including global warming or climate change are closely linked with changes in terrestrial and ocean ecosystems. Now the importance of clarifying the relations between ecosystem dynamics and global changes is increasing to predict future climate, and to assess the impacts of climate change to ecosystems including our human society. The research program has launched following four research groups:
a) Ecosystem-atmosphere interaction model group
b) Ecosystem architecture model group
c) Ecosystem geographical distribution model group
d) Marine biological process model group.
The first group is investigating mechanisms of material flows and of interactions between the terrestrial ecosystem and the atmosphere. The SIM-CYCLE has been developed to model the terrestrial ecosystem functions including photosynthesis or respiration, and for example, to predict future net ecosystem production (NEP) or carbon absorption responding the global warming. The second group is developing the Dynamic Vegetation Distribution Model (DVGM) to predict vegetation functions, structures and bio-diversity responding global warming in a time scale of several ten years to decade. The spatial scale of the model is from a leaf to a forest. The third group is tackling with observation and modeling of spatial structures of terrestrial ecosystem parameters including net primary production (NPP) or NEP from regional to grobal scale. Remote sensing of earth surface from satellites is one of the major technical tools in this group. The fourth group is investigating the interactions between the ocean and the atmosphere to clarify the relations between the biological productivities in the ocean and climate changes. In particular, dynamics in the structure and the function of ocean surface biota are modeled with the physical or chemical parameters at the ocean surface based on the in-situ observation and remote sensing.
The goal of the Ecosystem Change Research Program is to develop ecosystem models for the integrated global change model. Establishing the integrated model with atmosphere-ocean-ecosystem-human interactions will be most essential and urgent to the proper management of our society from local to global scale.
