This $100,000 Project Grant award, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Environmental Biology under the Biological Sciences CFDA program, will support research to improve the representation of plants in ecosystem models. The key products and services to be delivered under this 3-year award include:
Investigating methods to estimate plant traits using evolutionary histories to improve the parameterization of vegetation hydraulic traits in hydrologic and ecosystem models. The researchers will integrate this phylogenetic trait estimation approach into process-based ecohydrological and land surface models, and validate the modeling approach across 12 diverse research catchments.
The resulting process-based models will be applied to study the combined effects of climate change on catchment water ages, forest primary production and transpiration, tree hydraulic strategies, and their composite impact on drought risk and forest resilience. This research is expected to inform management practices to promote drought resilience in forests, advance ecosystem modeling, and build scientific workforce capacity.