Adapting Socio-ecological Systems to Increased Climate Variability. NSF, 2013-2018 (Co-I, PI: Ray Huhnke, Oklahoma State University)

We are involved in two tasks under this project: 1) Manipulative experiments: We will conduct the manipulative experiments the tallgrass prairie ecosystems to study how these ecosystems respond to climate warming the altered precipitation, including drought. We will collect standardized annual measures of annual net primary production, community structure and carbon fluxes, e.g., soil respiration and net ecosystem exchange; 2) Ecological system models and data assimilation: Climate models will be coupled with the Terrestrial ECOsystem (TECO) models to simulate and predict the effects of climate warming, land management, and drought on ecosystem services. We will assimilate mesoscale and experimental observational data to TECO to constrain model parameters to simulate ecosystem processes in response to climate change and land practice and to make projections under future climate scenarios.