Modeling Nutrient, Carbon and Water Dynamics of Tropical Forests Under Global Environmental Changes: New Patterns and Mechanisms

A special issue of Forests (ISSN 1999-4907). This special issue belongs to the section "Forest Inventory, Modeling and Remote Sensing".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2019)

Special Issue Editors

CAVElab-Computational & Applied Vegetation Ecology, Department of Environment, Ghent University, 9000 Gent, Belgium
Interests: carbon cycling; forests; ecosystem modelling
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
CAVElab - Computational & Applied Vegetation Ecology, Department of Environment, Faculty of Bioscience Engineering, Ghent University, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium
Interests: vegetation modelling; belowground competition for water; liana and tropical tree ecology and physiology; plant hydraulic traits and ecosystem resilience in drought conditions
Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research GmbH - UFZ, Permoserstraße 15, 04318 Leipzig, Germany
Interests: forest ecology and forest modelling; carbon cycle and disturbances in forest ecosystems; linking remote sensing and ecological modelling; the impact of climate change and land use change on ecosystem services; tropical forest fragmentation and their consequences

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Tropical forests are an essential component of the Earth system, contributing largely to the global carbon, nutrient and water cycles. These ecosystems are currently confronted to important environmental changes including, but not limited to, CO2 fertilization, rainfall perturbations, global warming, increased disturbances and drought that are likely to perturb the vegetation demography and hence the role these ecosystems play in the the global cycles. While local forest observations and experiments may highlight the drivers of tropical forest changes, they suffer from several limitations that modeling could help overcome. First, short-term experiments might result in different functioning than long-term outcomes would reveal. Secondly, chronic changes (steadily increase of CO2 concentration for example) could generate different reactions as compared to step-changes in conditions. Finally, the effort required to collect data exponentially increases as combinations of scenarios are considered. Furthermore, nonlinear relationships power the scaling from plant organs and individuals to forest stands which makes functional trait observation particularly tedious as it has to span different spatial scales.

For these reasons, process-based vegetation models are important tools to unravel future spatio-temporal patterns of nutrient, water and carbon fluxes of Tropical forests. They indeed can be tested over long periods of time on a almost unlimited number of forcing data that might include smooth and abrupt changes. Actually, the only limit to the total amount of simulations is the imagination (and sometimes time or computational resources).

This special issue welcomes contributions related to novel insights on patterns, drivers and mechanisms governing future forest nutrient, carbon and water dynamics from local to global scales, as revealed by vegetation models tested under different climatic scenarios.

Prof. Dr. Hans Verbeeck
Dr. Felicien Meunier
Dr. Rico Fischer
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Forests is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Modeling
  • Nutrient, Carbon and Water dynamics
  • Tropical forests
  • global environmental changes

Published Papers

There is no accepted submissions to this special issue at this moment.
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