Systems approaches in global change and biogeochemistry research

Abstract

Systems approaches have great potential for application in predictive ecology. In this paper, we present a range of examples, where systems approaches are being developed and applied at a range of scales in the field of global change and biogeochemical cycling. Systems approaches range from Bayesian calibration techniques at plot scale, through data assimilation methods at regional to continental scales, to multi-disciplinary numerical model applications at country to global scales. We provide examples from a range of studies and show how these approaches are being used to address current topics in global change and biogeochemical research, such as the interaction between carbon and nitrogen cycles, terrestrial carbon feedbacks to climate change and the attribution of observed global changes to various drivers of change. We examine how transferable the methods and techniques might be to other areas of ecosystem science and ecology.

Towards an integrated global framework to assess the impacts of land use and management change on soil carbon: current capability and future vision

“…Conforming to the standards would allow for new data and models to be easily incorporated into the estimation system. There is also the possibility to use model-data fusion techniques to optimize model performance, and to assimilate new data from diverse sources as they become available Rastetter et al, 2010;Smith et al, 2011).…”

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“…LeBauer et al, 2010). Sensitivity and uncertainty analyses of the models can help identify where data collection needs focus to best reduce uncertainty; however, for all process-based models, uncertainty can come from inputs, model structure or observations (Smith et al, 2012a). Due to the number of sources of uncertainty and limited data availability at present, uncertainty quantification is rarely addressed by the literature that report Miscanthus simulations.…”

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