44. Australasian Vegetation Scenarios

Organised by David Hilbert and Craig Miller, CSIRO. This working group is collaborative with ARC Earth System Science Network and with CSIRO Climate and Adaptation Flagship. First meeting to be scheduled.

PARTICIPANTS INCLUDE David Hilbert - CSIRO (Leader) Craig Miller - CSIRO (Leader) Rob Allen - Landcare Research, NZ Mike Austin - CSIRO Mike Dunlop - CSIRO Janet Franklin - San Diego State U (USA) John Leathwick - National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NZ) Ian Mansergh - Dept Environment and Sustainability, Victoria Vicky Temperton - Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (Germany) Susan Walker - Landcare Research, NZ Mark Westoby - Macquarie U

GOAL

Overall Research Question: How can Australian and New Zealand vegetation best be modelled nationally in order to reasonably predict the likely impacts of future climate change and provide insights to policy makers about useful adaptation strategies in a fairly short time-frame (c. 3 to 5 years?). 

Example questions include: (1) Which modelling approaches might be able to model vegetation with a national scope? (2) If there are modelling approaches that meet policy and research needs at the required scale but for too few regions, can research be undertaken to extend them to new regions? (3) If they cover required regions but have trouble with scale, is this a valuable research topic? (4) Are the necessary data availability for model development? (5) Can the model(s) be verified? (6) How can functional properties be best integrated? (7) Assess the capacity of modelling approaches to eventually either link to or be nested in broader DGVM’s at global scales (i.e., earth system models). (8) If several biome specific modelling approaches are necessary, how could we integrate these plural modelling efforts at a continental scale?

Last Updated December 2007