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Working group 2: Terrestrial Ecosystems


Public purposes

The participants will summarize the accomplishments of ecological studies in the United States and Japan from the viewpoint of environmental science, and discuss future collaborations.

  1. Focal point: climatic impacts on ecosystems
  2. Miscellaneous: clarifying the difference from IGBP and other projects is important

Practical purposes

  1. Collaboration among observation, process-study, modeling, and remote sensing
    - Model-data fusion or data assimilation
  2. Appeal to international projects such as IGBP
    - Global Land Project (GLP)
    - Integrated Land Ecosystem and Atmosphere Process Studies (iLEAPS)
  3. Advertisement of domestic projects
    - RR2002, CREST, GERF, RIHN projects, etc.
  4. Launch of original intercomparison studies
    - site-by-site, model-by-model, etc.

Keywords

Land, Forest, Grassland, Soil (microbes and rhizosphere), ecophysiology, biogeochemistry, carbon budget, remote sensing, human impact. Disturbance (forest fire), global warming, environmental pollution, ecosystem degradation, long-term ecosystem research (LTER), climate-ecosystem interaction, terrestrial-aquatic systems interaction, ecosystem management

Discussion topics

  1. Climate-ecosystem interaction
    - Climate change in the past, present, and future
    - Interactions between global warming and terrestrial ecosystems
    - Long-term monitoring of terrestrial ecosystems
  2. Human-ecosystem interactions
    - Human impacts: land-use, overgrazing, pollution, etc.
    - Possible ecological consequences of human impacts
    - Global monitoring of human impacts with remote sensing
  3. Ecosystem management
    - Ecosystem services
    - Mitigation of global warming (e.g., Kyoto Protocol)
    - Effective ecosystem management options

Summing-up

In both Japan and the Unites States, terrestrial ecosystems have undergone and will undergo severe human impacts, and climatic change will exert additionally influences. Therefore, we should correctly understand the climate-ecosystem interactions in the past, present, and future. This US-Japan workshop will summarize the present efforts on field observations, remote sensing, and modeling with respect to ecosystem change. The participants will specify their common issues with high priority and discuss the possibility of collaborations. Especially, they will put focus on the ongoing international projects such as IGBP, GEOSS, LTER, Fluxnet, and so on.

Convenor of WG2

Dr. Akihiko ITOH


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