Diversity, Patterns and Limits of the Earth’s Biosphere
Keynote in Keynotes
11.10.2012, 13:30-14:15, H8
The Earth’s biosphere is inherently diverse, but current approaches to model and predict the terrestrial biosphere usually do not consider this aspect. In this talk, I present a new, principled approach to simulate the diversity of plant functioning which we implement in the JEna DIversity (JEDI) model. In short, the key component in this approach is to test out a wide range of how plants allocate their carbon and how they respond to environmental changes and evaluate whether these are able to reproduce. This, in essence, implements the well-known notion of evolutionary ecology that “everything is everywhere, but the environment selects”.
The evaluation of this model shows that this relatively simple approach can yield realistic predictions of the large-scale patterns of plant species richness, the evenness in their abundance, as well as carbon and water exchange fluxes. I illustrate the potential of this approach to biodiversity by applications to global climatic change, to the evaluation of diversity-ecosystem functioning hypotheses and to limits in ecosystem services.
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