Seasonal greening in grasslands
Date
2013
Authors
Orescanin, Biljana, author
Denning, A. Scott, advisor
Randall, David A., committee member
Paustian, Keith H., committee member
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract
Grasslands cover about one quarter of the Earth's land and are currently considered to act as carbon sinks, taking up an estimated 0.5 Gt C per year. Thus, robust understanding of the grassland biome (e.g. representation of seasonal cycle of plant growth and the amount of green mass, often referred to as phenology, in global carbon models) plays a key role in understanding and predicting the global carbon cycle. The focus of this research is on improvement of a grassland biome representation in a biosphere model, which sometimes fails to correctly represent the phenology of vegetation. For this purpose, as a part of Simple Biosphere model (SiB3), a phenology model is tested and improved to provide more realistic representation of plant growth dependence on available moisture, which along with temperature and light controls plant growth. The new methodology employs integrated soil moisture in plant growth simulation. This new representation addresses the nature of the plants to use their root system to access the water supply. At same time it represents the plant's moisture recourses more accurately than the currently used vapor pressure method, which in grasslands is often non-correlated with soil conditions. The new technique has been developed and tested on data from the Skukuza flux tower site in South Africa and evaluated at 6 different flux tower sites around the world covering a variety of climate conditions. The technique is relatively easy and inexpensive to implement into the existing model providing excellent results capturing both the onset of green season and greening cycle at all locations. Although the method is developed for grasslands biome its representation of natural plant processes provides a good potential for its global use.
Description
Rights Access
Subject
carbon cycle
grasslands
phenology
seasonal greening
SiB3
soil moisture