Title: Predicting earth system response to global environmental change: Can we get there from here?
Abstract: Understanding how diverse taxa and ecosystems, from local to global scales, will respond to multi-factorial environmental change is a ‘wicked’ problem – due to uncertainty about generality of behavior among taxa, ecosystems, and biomes; weak understanding of complex interactions; and a limited toolbox with which to examine these knowledge gaps. As a result, estimates of future terrestrial land carbon sink strength vary incredibly among the leading global models. In my talk I will show how data – ‘big’ and ‘small’ from global plant trait and forest inventory data bases to smaller networks of ecosystem-scale experiments with factors such as CO 2 , temperature, rainfall, fire and biodiversity - help us to advance in such efforts.