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| Titel |
Assessing the Risk of Ecosystem Disruption in Europe using a Dynamic Vegetation Model driven by CMIP5 Regional Climatic Projections from EURO-CORDEX |
| VerfasserIn |
Marie Dury, Louis Francois, Alain Hambuckers, Alexandra Henrot, Ingrid Jacquemin, Guy Munhoven |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2016
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
en
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 18 (2016) |
| Datensatznummer |
250130153
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2016-10364.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| While the combination of warmer and drier mean climatic conditions can have severe impacts
on ecosystems, extreme events like droughts or heat waves that break the gradual climate
change can have more long-term consequences on ecosystem composition, functioning and
carbon storage. Hence, it is essential to assess the changes in climate variability and
the changes in frequency of extreme events projected for the future. Ecosystems
could not be in a condition to adapt to these new conditions and might be disrupted.
Here, the process-based dynamic vegetation model CARAIB DVM was used to
evaluate and analyze how future climate and extreme events will affect European
ecosystems.
To quantify the uncertainties in the climatic projections and in their potential impacts on
ecosystems, the vegetation model was driven with the outputs of different regional climatic
models (RCMs), nested in CMIP5 GCM projections for the EURO-CORDEX project:
ALADIN53 (Météo-France/CNRM), RACMO22E (KNMI), RCA4 (SMHI) and
REMO2009 (MPI-CSC) RCMs. These climatic projections are at a high spatial
resolution (0.11-degree, ∼12 km). CARAIB simulations were performed across
Europe over the historical period 1951-2005 and the future period 2006-2100 under
RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 emission scenarios. We simulated a set of 99 individual species
(47 herbs, 12 shrubs and 40 trees) representing the major European ecosystem
flora.
First, we analyzed the climatic variability simulated by the climatic models over the
historical period and compared it with the observed climatic variability. None of these
climatic models can reproduce accurately the present natural climatic variability. Then, to
assess the risk of ecosystem disruption in the future and to identify the vulnerable areas in
Europe, we created an index combining several CARAIB outputs: runoff, mean NPP,
soil turnover, burned area, appearance and disappearance of species. We evaluated
the severity of change projected for these variables (period 2070-2099) relative
to their current variability (period 1970-1999). Mean changes were considered
severe if they exceed observed variability. The highest values of the index were
found in southern Europe, indicating that the amplitude of the expected ecosystem
changes largely exceeds current interannual variability in this area. This spatial risk
index and the projections of potential shifts in species distributions are directly
dedicated to current forest management to guide in planting or in assisted migration. |
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