Quantifying the Role That Terrestrial Ecosystems Play in Earth's Climate

Biologists have widely documented how the local environment influences plants. However, the reverse is also true: plant distribution and functioning control the local energy balance at Earth’s surface and directly modify regional and global scale climate. In this talk I will discuss how plants modify the climate system and its response to external forcing. We investigate the sensitivity of the atmosphere to changes in land surface properties, and quantify the contribution from direct land surface responses and atmospheric feedbacks as well as implications for ecosystems. We will also explore the role that plant responses to a changing climate can further modify climate and how we quantify conditions such as drought. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that ecosystems and climate must be considered together as a coupled system, particularly when assessing the response of the climate system to change.