Abstract

Ecosystems are major source of uncertainty for models of climate change. In this workshop, we are interesting in identifying open problems in connecting reduced models of ecosystem dynamics and diversity with geophysical aspects of climate change.

As examples of widespread frameworks to focus on, metabolic and maximum entropy theories predict scaling relations that provide useful, provocative, and predictive base models for individual growth, ecosystem diversity, and energy and mass flows. On the other hand, these approaches usually make strong assumptions about equilibrium or manifest steady state properties that negatively impact predictions of the feedback and feedforward loop between ecological dynamics and climate. For example, a major overlooked aspect is that ecosystems are being driven by endogenous and exogenous events.

We aim to discuss how where we might connect the frameworks to each other, build on them to incorporate missing aspects, and to propose concrete collaborative directions for research projects and grants.