Project 2.5ii.2 - Climate change: scaling from trees to ecosystems

Project Leader:  Dr Mike Liddell, James Cook University 

Most of the research discussed in Program 5ii is at the landscape level with a range of sites being used to provide the data for the modeling work.  Project 2.5ii.2 will look in much more detail at a single site (tropical lowland rainforest) and determine how plants and invertebrates respond physiologically and phenologically (e.g. fruiting, flowering, etc.) to natural climate variability and how trees and forests as a whole respond in terms of carbon and water use.  This information will be used to indicate the sensitivity of ecosystems to climate change by scaling-up for the region.  This research will be carried out at the Australian Canopy Crane research facility and takes advantage of over $2 million in infrastructure and datasets spanning five years.

Project 2.5ii.2 aims to:

• improve our understanding of the factors influencing the variability in carbon and water fluxes from the rainforest through a long-term study in parallel with microclimate measurements;

• understand the biology underlying the differential effect of climate change on productivity of different floristic elements of a taxonomically diverse rainforest canopy – essential baseline data for predictive and scaling models of ecosystem productivity;

• determine the likely effects of changing climate on the fluxes of carbon and water belowground, and on the factors controlling these fluxes;

• understand the partitioning of whole-canopy net primary productivity and water use efficiency into major floristic components, to integrate with flux and hydrology measurements at the footprint scale. This information will be used to develop forest-level models of net primary productivity in tropical lowland rainforests which can then be used as a predictive tools in investigating the climate sensitivity of these forests; and

• understand how invertebrate populations fluctuate in relation to local climatic variables and ecological processes, e.g. plant pollination, herbivory, decomposition.