Quantifying the role that terrestrial ecosystems play in Earth's climate

Background/Question/Methods

Biologists have widely documented how the local environment influences plants. Recent findings suggest, surprisingly, that the reverse is also true: plant distribution and functioning control the local energy balance at Earth’s surface and directly modify regional and global scale climate. In this talk I will discuss how plants modify the climate system and its response to external forcing. We will investigate the sensitivity of the atmosphere to changes in plant cover, in particular the location of plant cover change. We will also explore the role that plant responses to a changing climate can further modify climate.

Results/Conclusions

We find that the atmosphere has spatially varying sensitivity to changes on the land surface such that the location of plant cover change has an outsized control over both the local and larger scale climate impact. Further, plant cover changes are not the only way for plants to influence the atmosphere, changes in plant functioning in response to higher CO₂, altered climate, or changes in ecosystem dynamics can also have climate impacts.

Taken together, these findings demonstrate that ecosystems and climate must be considered together as a coupled system, particularly when assessing the response of the climate system to change.