Tasks and Schedule

 

 

The proposed task does not rely on a single sensor or a specific mission but will draw its data from the large number of land data products that have been made available over the past decades. The proposed team will work towards making better use of existing products (e.g. ESA’s CCI) and will pay special attention to spatial integration of different products and temporal analysis of existing land data products. The proposed team will thus add value to existing data products through integrating with other data sources such as census data and populations statistics.

Tasks of the team:

The team will hold two meetings in Bern that address the objectives formulated above.

Meeting 1. Assess the available regional and global information on current and historical land management (both EO and census data) and determine to which extent this information can be harmonized, specifically using remotely sensed EO data

During proposal preparation the spatially explicit information on the following attributes were considered to be of relevance for the proposed ISSI team: Forest and harvest biomass, Livestock stocking, Irrigation intensity, Degradation-soil erosion, Species distribution, Drainage intensity and Fertilizer type and intensity. This list is neither exhaustive nor final and will be used as the start of the discussion during the first workshop. For each of the listed attributes the required spatially explicit product will be described as well as the data needs, and their current availability both spatially and temporarily. We developed this approach for irrigation intensity (Annex 1) as an example of the expected outcome of the first workshop.

Some of the most successful applications of EO datasets in Earth system modeling have required an extension of the data to time periods before and after the satellite era. Because of delayed effects (such as soil carbon adjustments to land use change) and slower responses of some of the components of the climate-carbon cycle system (such as ocean dynamics, plant growth to a new equilibrium) estimates of many present-day carbon fluxes and climatic effects depend on the history of land use and land management over many decades and centuries in the past. Similarly, to project the future state of the climate-carbon cycle system and our required mitigation efforts, scenarios of land use and land management are needed for at least the next 100 years.

Such an extension of EO products in the past and the future has been successfully performed for data on land cover change and wood harvest. Proxies for the historical development were taken from inventories, demographic and other census data, and a range of historical literature (e.g., Klein Goldewijk et al, 2011; Pongratz et al, 2008) while future scenarios from Integrated Assessment Models have successfully been harmonized with historical records (Hurtt et al., 2011). We will also explore how far such approaches for land cover and wood harvest data are applicable to the land management datasets.

 

Meeting 2, develop appropriate modeling concepts to incorporate the EO and census information in global scale land vegetation/carbon cycle models.

During the second meeting we will address two challenges that are interlinked. First the need to assess and quantify the scale and importance of different land management activities, such as irrigation, fertilizer application, stocking rates in order to decide on possible model restructuring (e.g. the development of new land cover related functional entities). Prior to the second workshop, workshop participants will prepare a literature study to identify the processes that are affected by the land management activities with the largest climate and carbon response. During the workshop, both the activities and processes will be scored for their perceived importance in the Earth System Models. This scoring will enable the modeling groups to set priorities in terms of new model developments and to quantify the relative role of potentially competing effects of land management on biophysical effects and carbon storage.

Second, as an outcome of the first meeting, data available and their match to the requirements of ESMs (spatio-temporal resolution, etc.) will be known and scored. By combining data availability from meeting 1 and scores for activity (Y-axis) with process representation (X-axis) a priority matrix can be made (Fig. 2) that will guide our future work. The outcome of this workshop will be an updated table prioritizing the processes that need to be incorporated in ESMs to account for land management activities. We expect to develop strategies to incorporate these and present the relevant datasets.

Schedule

Two team meetings are planned at ISSI over the project duration. In between meetings, e‐mail exchange and the website will enable continued collaboration and discussion. We anticipate each to be a 3‐4 day meeting. The first meeting is intended for the autumn/winter of 2013/2014 and the second in late spring 2015. We aim to align our meetings with other carbon relevant activities in ISSI such as on assimilation and plant traits.

Output

We expect to generate at least one peer reviewed paper each from the meetings. While these could be of a review nature (i.e. the review before the second meeting on the relevance of activities for key processes in the carbon cycle), we also expect some more specialist papers on specific data sets to emerge from our meetings. Next to this we expect to be able to generate one to several data sets that arise from the merging of the EO and census data, which are immediately useful in the application for ESMs.