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Inspire Session

Session: : Tropical Forests & Global Change: Biogeochemical Responses and Opportunities for Cross-Sites Comparisons

INS 22-8 - Root-soil interactions and model-informed data gaps in tropical forests

Wednesday, August 9, 2023
10:00 AM – 11:30 AM PDT
Location: C123
Modeling plant nutrient acquisition is critical to carbon projections in tropical forests, yet our understanding of nutrient uptake is limited by the difficulty of measuring belowground interactions. Efficient progress in this area requires deep integration between measurements and models. Here, we discuss multiple approaches by our modeler-empiricist team, targeting key parameters in a forest demography-explicit model (ELM-FATES). We find that ELM-FATES is highly sensitive to nutrient uptake parameters, which data synthesis and field campaigns reveal to be related to root morphology and soil fertility. These findings inform model development and serve as an example of data-model integration in tropical ecology.