2018 ESA Annual Meeting (August 5 -- 10)

OOS 15 - Vegetation Dynamics and Ecosystem Resilience Under Global Climate Change

Tuesday, August 7, 2018: 1:30 PM-5:00 PM
346-347, New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
Organizer:
Kailiang Yu
Co-organizers:
Andrew Kulmatiski and William Smith
Moderator:
Andrew Kulmatiski
Over the past 50 years, large-scale vegetation changes, such as forest decline, shrub encroachment and range expansion of invasive species, have been observed around the world. Changing climate conditions are likely to be important, but it remains difficult to attribute these changes in vegetation composition and services to changing climate conditions because many factors have changed over the same time period. The theory of ecosystem resilience suggests that these vegetation changes could potentially lead to abrupt state transitions (regime shifts), especially for ecosystems near critical threshold transition points. This theory fundamentally changes the view on the potential effects of global change on ecosystems and on management and restoration options. The current mechanistic understandings of the ecosystem transitions, however, remain limited. In particular, the long term experimental evidence integrated with advanced remote sensing data and processed-based models is scare. This session will explore some of the latest research exploring the role of changing climate conditions on vegetation changes and the regime shifts at forest / savanna / shrubland boundaries around the world. Central questions to be addressed during this session are: 1) what are the ecophysiological and ecohydrological controls of vegetation changes in a rapid changing climate? 2) is climate change causing transitions among alternative stable state communities? 3) what are the impacts and implications of this transition? and 4) what early warning signals could be used to detect the transition for management and restoration purpose? The first half of the session will explore ecohydrological controls on forest dynamics at regional/global scales (Section I). The second half of the session will explore grassland-shrubland and forest-savanna transitions (Section II).   Our proposed session will bring together researchers working across diverse ecosystems such as grasslands, shrublands, savannas, and forests and using a variety of experimental, observational, and processed-based approaches to improve how we understand and predict the effects of global climate change on vegetation and ecosystem resilience. This session would have a broad interest to ecologists across different disciplines in a variety of ecosystems.
1:30 PM
Remotely sensed canopy water content as an indicator of tree mortality risk
Krishna Rao, Stanford University; William Anderegg, University of Utah; Anna Sala, University of Montana; Jordi Martinez-Vilalta, CREAF / UAB; Alexandra Konings, Stanford University
1:50 PM
Belowground processes mediate tree responses to global change
D. Scott Mackay, SUNY-Buffalo; Charlotte Grossiord, Los Alamos National Laboratory; Daniel M. Johnson, University of Idaho; Nathan McDowell, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Phil Savoy, Duke University; John S. Sperry, University of Utah
2:30 PM
A multi-factor climate change perspective on forest drought resilience: Modeling the integrated effects of heat, drought, and CO2 on tree mortality
Anthony J. Parolari, Marquette University; Cheng-Wei Huang, University of New Mexico; Yanlan Liu, Duke University; Amanda M. Schwantes, Duke University; Gabriel G. Katul, Duke University; Mukesh Kumar, Duke University; Amilcare Porporato, Princeton University
2:50 PM
Ecological responses to a changing climate: Do observations and experiments tell us the same thing?
Alan Knapp, Colorado State University; Charles J.W. Carroll, Colorado State University; Ingrid J. Slette, Colorado State University; Robert James Griffin-Nolan, Colorado State University; Andrew Felton, Utah State University; Melinda Smith, Colorado State University
3:10 PM
3:20 PM
Impacts of drought on interactions between grass and grazers
Carla Staver, Yale University; Corli Wigley-Coetsee, South African National Parks; Judith Botha, South African National Parks
4:00 PM
Reduced resilience as a potential early warning signal of forest mortality
Yanlan Liu, Duke University; Mukesh Kumar, Duke University; Gabriel G. Katul, Duke University; Amilcare Porporato, Princeton University
4:20 PM
Grassland, savanna and forest: Alternative stable states in terrestrial ecosystems
Sabiha Majumder, ETH Zurich; Jean-Francois Bastin, ETH Zurich; Devin Routh, ETH Zurich; Tom Crowther, ETH