讲座简介

Land-atmosphere exchanges of carbon, water and energy are an important component of the Earth System with implications for climate as well as for ecosystems. But current land surface models produce widely divergent predictions, and perform poorly when confronted with present-day benchmarks. In this talk Colin will argue that the two key reasons for this continuing poor performance are (a) failure to use the full power of available observations during model development, and (b) ignoring the simplifying constraints that natural selection imposes on organisms. He will show how explicit consideration of eco-evolutionary optimality can lead to simpler, better model representations of key processes; and he will describe a blueprint for a next-generation land surface model that will stand on firmer foundations.

主讲人简介

Professor Colin Prentice is interested in how plants and ecosystems interact with changes in climate and other aspects of the physical environment. He received Bachelors and PhD degrees from Cambridge University. After holding positions in universities and research institutes around the world, Colin currently holds the AXA Chair of Biosphere and Climate Impacts in the Department of Life Science, Imperial College London. Colin has published more than 250 papers in major international journals, and has a Scopus h-index of 89. He led the chapter on the global carbon cycle in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report, and shared the Nobel prize awarded to the IPCC.