Impact of climate change on prairie soil water dynamics

Abstract

The aim of my presentation is to show how the TECO model’s soil water dynamics respond to different global climate change scenarios. I did this by determining different independent and co-varying effects of temperature, precipitation and atmospheric CO2 as inputs into the model. Included in this evaluation of the model, I will show how varying of these effects then altered the rain use efficiency and water use efficiency of an ecosystem. To validate the model an overall comparison of results with no varying temperature, precipitation and atmospheric CO2 were shown to be consistent with natural measured patterns of soil water dynamics. Then when under the varying conditions of the determined parameters, it was shown that the model also had similar results to that of previous natural field experiments. Based on the fact that net primary production (NPP) and biomass have been both shown to respond well to varying changes in temperature, precipitation, and atmospheric CO2, we have also revealed that the TECO model has very interesting results of how RUE and WUE respond to different climate change scenarios. We wish to show how the overall evaluation of the TECO’s soil water dynamics section of the model fits reasonably well to expected changes in ecosystem processes under different climate change scenarios.