Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Climatic and Environmental Change. ORNL, 2022-2023 (Co-I, PIs: Paul Hanson and Daniel Ricciuto, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

This work is to support ORNL’s TES SFA by developing and implementing an ecological forecasting system. The forecasting system is called Ecological Platform for Assimilating Data into models toward forecasting (EcoPAD). EcoPAD was developed by Luo Ecolab with prior NSF support and can be used to synthesize past drivers, future scenarios, model processes and parameters, and real or proposed observations to predict future states of ecosystems. In this project, EcoPAD will be used to synthesize both online and offline data streams to project future states of ecosystems that are exposed to different temperature and CO2 treatments in SPURCE in a probabilistic ensemble using uncertainty quantification. We will also use this approach to make hindcasts and forecasts, identify model shortcomings, and provide feedback to field scientists to prioritize observations that will maximize uncertainty reduction.