Plants and vegetation play a critical role in supporting life on Earth, but there is still a lot of uncertainty in our understanding of how exactly they affect the global carbon cycle and ecosystem services.
A new IIASA-led study explored the most important organizing principles that control vegetation behavior and how they can be used to improve vegetation models.
We rely on the plants that make up our planet’s ecosystems to release oxygen into the atmosphere, absorb carbon dioxide (CO2), and provide habitat and food for wildlife and humans. These services are critical in the future management of climate change, especially in terms of CO2 uptake and release, but due to the many complex, interacting processes that affect the ability of vegetation to provide these services, they remain difficult to predict.
In an IIASA-led perspective published in the journal Nature Plants, an international team of researchers endeavored to address this problem by exploring approaches to master this complexity and improve our ability to predict vegetation dynamics.
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