The ever-changing role of biodiversity in forests: implications for climate change projections

Summary

Forests possess two important qualities of great relevance to earth’s systems: they represent an incredibly species-rich biome and are a critical regulator of the global carbon cycle. These two qualities, diversity and carbon composition, are now recognized as needing integration in conceptual, functional, and predictive research on climate change. In this talk, I will offer some context to these two contrasting ways of thinking about forests, and then discuss some ways they are being integrated, again, conceptually, functionally, and in the predictive realm. This integration marks a central challenge to both the improvement of Earth System models as well as better predicting the future of our biodiversity crisis.