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Background The rate of CO2 uptake by photosynthesis is determined by the acclimation of leaves to the prevailing light environment. In dense forests, light intensity decreases exponentially as we go from the top of the canopy towards the ground, as light is absorbed and scattered by leaves.

Background Seasonal water deficits, caused by the imbalance of water from the land surface through evapotranspiration and runoff and the gain through precipitation, are an important driver of agricultural productivity and forest growth.

Background Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs) are key tools for understanding biosphere-climate feedbacks and transient vegetation dynamics in response to global change. A novel vegetation demography model, the BiomeE, is a mechanistic cohort-based model which simulates vegetation dynamics and biogeochemical processes.

Background Droughts have major impacts on fluxes between land and the atmosphere, agricultural production, and the carbon cycle. Future projections of drought magnitude and frequencies are surprisingly divergent and interpretations of trends from Earth System Model outputs have drawn conflicting pictures of drought impact trends in a heating climate.

Background The gross primary production (GPP) of an ecosystem, that is, the carbon it assimilates via photosynthesis, differs strongly from one year to the next. This variability between years is called the interannual variability (IAV) of GPP and the reasons for why GPP can change substantially from year to year are unclear.

Supervision: Dr. Laura Marques and Prof. Benjamin Stocker Background Climate warming is driving an advance of leaf unfolding in trees, promoting longer growing seasons. However, the advance of the start-of-the-season (SOS) can induce false springs, i.

Supervision: Dr. Koen Hufkens and Prof. Benjamin Stocker We call on students to determine the importance of topographic and soil factors on natural vegetative landscape components (forest cover fraction, vegetation height, woody fraction).

Modelling biophysical limits to forest production