Workshop Summary
Going beyond Plant Functional Types:
Next-Generation Concepts in Plant Ecological Modelling
Held 23-25 June 2010, Hotel Golden Tulip, Varna, Bulgaria
Scientific organizer: Peter van Bodegom
Local organizer: Maryana Lyubenova, Alexander Chikalanov
In the workshop a group of experts discussed the way vegetation should be represented in Earth System Models (ESMs) in the future. The current vegetation representation in these models by so-called plant functional types (PFTs) with fixed vegetation attributes has particular drawbacks. Recent global database analysis of plant traits showed that various traits are highly variable within plant functional types. This variability may potentially be incorporated into ESMs by allowing for random variations within PFTs. Alternatively, as discussed during the workshop, the variability may be estimated as a function of climate, soil and hydrology based on species assembly principles. A radical alternative may be to remove all PFTs from ESMs, but to work with regional and global trait variability and trait-trait tradeoffs only. The latter may be done based on empirical relations from meta-analyses, models that only retain those trait combinations that survive or by optimality principles. For the last solution, it will be critically important to better understand the first principles of trait selection and its trade-offs of which various issues were discussed. The preferred solution to represent vegetation will probably depend on the aim of the ESM, which is either to project future fluxes of CO2 and H2O or to project shifts in species and vegetation distribution upon global change. These options, and the extent to which remote sensing products may aid the developments, will be further explored in a perspective paper that will be written based on the discussions of this workshop.
Peter van Bodegom