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Context: Vegetation dynamics and the land carbon cycle can now be modelled more realistically thanks to a new generation of demography-resolving vegetation models. The succession of vegetation types since the Last Glacial Maximum, as reconstructed paleo-climatic archives, provides a perfect test for these models’ hindcasts of vegetation change and thus also their forecasts of vegetation responses to future climate change.

Context: Tree-ring data is available in spades but has only marginally been used in the context of climate impacts on the land carbon cycle. Aim: This project will develop methods to use information of annual tree-ring anomalies for constraining modelled tree growth and forest dynamics in response to climate variability.

Main supervision: Prof. Dr. Benjamin Stocker Co-supervision: Dr. Antoine Cabon, WSL Birmensdorf Forests currently represent a large carbon sink, offsetting a quarter of human CO2 emissions each year, bur large uncertainty remains on the future strength of this sink.

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.

Supervision: Prof. Benjamin Stocker, Co-supervision: Dr. Laura Marqués, Dr. Yann Vitasse (WSL Birmensdorf) 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: Prof. Benjamin Stocker Background Exchange fluxes of water vapour between ecosystems and the atmosphere are commonly measured using eddy-covariance technique. This gives information about how much water is transpired by plants and evaporated from soil and plant surfaces.

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).