Linking Multi-scale Remotely Sensed Data, Field Observations and Biogeochemistry Models to Evaluate Changes in the Terrestrial Ecosystems of China.

Auburn University

Linking Multi-scale Remotely Sensed Data, Field Observations and Biogeochemistry Models to Evaluate Changes in the Terrestrial Ecosystems of China .

Hanqin Tian, Professor

Forestry & Wildlife Bldg.
602 Duncan Drive
Auburn, AL 36849-5418
(334) 844-1007
(334) 844-1084 FAX

For millennia, Chinese people have altered the landscape in many ways in pursuit of food, fuel and fiber. China’s expanding economy, which is the fastest growing in the world along with continued population growth, will lead to continued land transformations in the next decades, including dramatic urbanization. While we have a qualitative sense that land transformations across China have affected and will continue to affect the ability of China’s ecosystems to provide people with essential goods and services, our challenge now is to quantify exactly how the provision of key goods and services has changed. Here we propose a partnership between Chinese and US scientists to combine remote-sensing data and a set of biogeochemical simulation models to quantify the consequences of land transformations on productivity in forests and other "natural" ecosystems and carbon sequestration. We will document the patterns of land-use change across China from 1980 to present. We will also examine how ecosystem goods and services have changed as a result of multiple stresses and interactions among those stresses including land-use change, climate variability, atmospheric composition (carbon dioxide and tropospheric ozone), precipitation chemistry (nitrogen composition), and fire frequency using estimates of gross primary production (GPP), net primary production (NPP) and carbon storage from factorial simulation experiments with three terrestrial biogeochemistry models. Model estimates along with spatial and temporal patterns of GPP, NPP and carbon storage will be compared to satellite-derived estimates of these carbon fluxes and pools. The estimates of GPP, NPP and vegetation carbon storage of both of these approaches will be evaluated through comparisons with the results of field studies and forest and soil inventories within China. The products of this research will be made available to the larger scientific community via the web.