Transformation of larch-dominated forests and woodlands into mixed taiga

Abstract from proposal: The proposed research approach combines ecosystem modeling and remote sensing to document and extend recent findings by the proposal team that southern Siberian forest species are invading traditional larch forests, and that the implications of these changes are significant to biodiversity and feedbacks to climate. The key effort in this proposed project is the coupling of soil moisture and temperature models to an existing forest simulator already in place for the Northern Eurasian larch forest. Vegetation structure simulating quasi-stable and transforming ecosystems will be derived using the model of forest growth and dynamics constrained by dynamic soil processes including moisture, temperature and nutrients. This is critical to the success of understanding biodiversity because of the prevalence of continuous and discontinuous permafrost underlying soils in this region of observed warming over the past 30 years. The expected changes in forest species diversity in response to observed increases in temperature and related controlling factors over the past three decades and into the future will be examined. Analysis of remote sensing imagery will provide information on current forest type and disturbance history. In addition, forest structure measurements from lidar and high spatial and spectral resolution sensors will be used to initialize and validate the combined forest growth and soil models.

Goal:The research activities are to ascertain whether the already observed evergreen conifer invasion is widespread or limited by specific regional climatic and spatial contexts.

Method:This interdisciplinary project brings together University and NASA expertise in forest succession modeling, permafrost modeling, forest ecology, remote sensing data analysis and field measurements to reveal the current extent and future changes of the immense larch forests of Siberia and eastern Russia.

Personnel: Elissa R. Levine, Hank Shugart Jr., K. Jon. Ranson, Nicole Mölders, Robert G. Knox, Guoqing Sun, Vyacheslav I. Kharuk

Sponsor:NASA

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