MdM SEMINAR SERIES: “Understanding past, present and future carbon uptake by terrestrial ecosystems: a multidisciplinary challenge” by Prof. Iain Colin Prentice FRS

MdM SEMINAR SERIES

Title: “Understanding past, present and future carbon uptake by terrestrial ecosystems: a multidisciplinary challenge”

Speaker: Prof. Iain Colin Prentice FRS, AXA Chair of Biosphere and Climate Impacts, Imperial College London

Date: Wednesday, January 16th 2019

Time: 12h

Venue: room Z/022- Z/023

Terrestrial ecosystems are performing a valuable service by taking up, in the decadal average, more than a quarter of the total anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide. Yet the mechanisms involved are still disputed, and numerical models continue to give widely deviating projections of the future of this global uptake. Moreover, despite sustained efforts, these models are not improving (in terms of their agreement with present and historical observations), and their projections of the future are not converging. I will argue that this situation reflects (a) a tradition in biology to focus on the diversity (rather than the unity) of life, which hinders the search for unifying principles; (b) an undue focus on future projection (rather than explanation) as the principal goal of models; and (c) a distortion of research priorities and culture that unconsciously reflects the politicization of climate and carbon cycle science. I will further argue, however, that scientists have a responsibility to be aware of both disciplinary limitations and political pressures, and to consciously resist them. On the other hand, the international “spotlight” on climate and the carbon cycle has permitted huge advances in the availability of relevant data, at scales from individual plant leaves to satellite observations of the whole Earth, and these advances provide immense opportunities: both for improved scientific understanding of the carbon cycle, and for the development of better-founded predictive models. I will show how recent theoretical advances based on eco-evolutionary optimality concepts have led to general, testable hypotheses concerning the most fundamental processes underlying ecosystem function – forming the basis for an emerging new generation of models, resting on firmer theoretical and empirical foundations than those they will eventually replace.

Professor Iain Colin Prentice FRS holds the AXA Chair in Biosphere and Climate Impacts in the Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, and an Honorary Professorship in Ecology and Evolution at Macquarie University in Sydney. He has a PhD in Botany from Cambridge University and has held academic and research leadership positions in several countries, including the Chair of Plant Ecology at Lund University, and a founding Directorship of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena. He led the research programme Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System for the UK Natural Environment Research Council. He developed the standard model for pollen source area, popularized now widely used techniques to analyse species composition along environmental gradients, and led the international development of succcessive generations of large-scale ecosystem models – from equilibrium biogeography (BIOME) to coupled biogeochemistry and vegetation dynamics (LPJ). He was a founding member and, later, co-chair of the Internal Geosphere-Biosphere programme task force on Global Analysis, Integration and Modelling; and co-chair of its successor project Analysis, Integration and Modelling of the Earth System. He was co-ordinating lead author for “The carbon cycle and atmospheric carbon dioxide” in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report, and a reviewer in subsequent reports. He is currently Director of the Masters programme in Ecosystems and Environmental Change at Imperial College. His research, now supported by the European Research Council advanced grant Re-Inventing Ecosystem and Land-surface Models (REALM), applies eco-evolutionary optimality concepts to develop and test new quantitative theory for plant and ecosystem function and land-atmosphere exchanges of energy, water and carbon dioxide with the goal of more robust global modelling of terrestrial Earth system processes.