13 April, 2019 (Bonan, ANN, Climate)

Bonan, G. B. (2016). Forests, climate, and public policy: A 500-year interdisciplinary odyssey. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, 47, 97–121.

I anticipated that this paper explains how the results from forest-climate research have been deployed to public policy. However, this paper had its focus to forest-climate relationships, and “these relationships should be understood well to be properly applied to policy” was all about the public policy.

Nevertheless, this paper is still interesting enough to read. For me, it was interesing that meteorologist didn’t believe that forest affects the climate. Because of this, efforts to investigate forset-climate relationships and include them to climate model were delayed until late 20th century.

This paper also provides an overview about forest-climate relationships. There are two countered effects. Forest may warm the climate because it has low albedo and emits BVOCs which form aerosol. Conversely, forest may also cool the climate because it accelerates evapotranspiration and turbulent fluxes, and it assimilates atmospheric CO~2~. Interestingly, these effect can vary by spatial and temporal scales. For example, biogeophysical processes (e.g. albedo, ET) are of local to regional scale ones, while biogeochemical processes (e.g. CO~2~ uptake) are of global scale ones. Moreover, it’s difficult to predict the effect of local forest cover change on the climate of other region or global climate.

There are also many papers discuss about forest-climate interaction:

Bonan, G. (2015). Ecological climatology: concepts and applications. Cambridge University Press.
Bonan, G. B. (2008). Forests and climate change: forcings, feedbacks, and the climate benefits of forests. Science, 320(5882), 1444–1449.
Popkin, G. (2019). How much can forests fight climate change? Nature

Lastly, this paper emphasizes that ESM is a key tool to understand biosphere-atmosphere interaction.

“Earth system models provide the single-most comprehensive analysis of biosphere-atmosphere interactions in a variety of contexts.”

ESM has many uncertainties and should be cross-validated with other observations such as flux tower measurement and satellite data.