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Harvard Forest Research Project 2024
- Title: Modeling climate change impacts on forest carbon storage
- Principal investigator: Jonathan Thompson (jthomps@fas.harvard.edu)
- Institution: Harvard Forest
- Primary contact: Xiaojie Gao (xiaojiegao@fas.harvard.edu)
- Team members: Xiaojie Gao
Danelle Laflower - Abstract:
Climate change has significantly altered the dynamics of forests such as seasonality and photosynthesis, thereby affecting forest carbon sequestration and storage. Understanding the dynamics of forests in response to climate change is thus critical for managing forests, making conservation policies, and developing nature-based climate solutions. For this study, the student will investigate changes in climate during the last several decades and use simulation models to quantify the corresponding impacts on forest carbon storage. Model validation will be conducted at Harvard Forest where abundant data are available, and model simulation will be based on future climate scenarios. The goal will be to improve our understanding of how climate change has affected and will affect, long-term forest dynamics and carbon storage.
This subproject will provide an opportunity to become familiar with forest simulation models, to develop R scripts to interact with these models, to learn GIS tools for R, and to practice open science.
