Accounting for herbaceous communities in process‐based models will advance our understanding of “grassy” ecosystems

作者：Kevin R. Wilcox, Anping Chen, Meghan L. Avolio, Ethan E. Butler, Scott L. Collins, Rosie A. Fisher, Trevor F. Keenan, Nancy Y. Kiang, Alan K. Knapp, Sally E. Koerner, Lara M. Kueppers, Guopeng Liang, Eva Lieungh, Michael E. Loik, Yiqi Luo, Benjamin Poulter, Peter B. Reich, Katherine M. Renwick, Melinda D. Smith, Anthony P. Walker, Ensheng Weng, Kimberly J. Komatsu · 发表于：Global Change Biology · 年份：2023 · DOI：10.1111/gcb.16950 · 被引用次数：11 · 研究领域：Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies、Peatlands and Wetlands Ecology、Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics

Grassland and other herbaceous communities cover significant portions of Earth's terrestrial surface and provide many critical services, such as carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, and food production. Forecasts of global change impacts on these services will require predictive tools, such as process-based dynamic vegetation models. Yet, model representation of herbaceous communities and ecosystems lags substantially behind that of tree communities and forests. The limited representation of herbaceous communities within models arises from two important knowledge gaps: first, our empirical understanding of the principles governing herbaceous vegetation dynamics is either incomplete or does not provide mechanistic information necessary to drive herbaceous community processes with models; second, current model structure and parameterization of grass and other herbaceous plant functional types limits the ability of models to predict outcomes of competition and growth for herbaceous vegetation. In this review, we provide direction for addressing these gaps by: (1) presenting a brief history of how vegetation dynamics have been developed and incorporated into earth system models, (2) reporting on a model simulation activity to evaluate current model capability to represent herbaceous vegetation dynamics and ecosystem function, and (3) detailing several ecological properties and phenomena that should be a focus for both empiricists and modelers to improve representation of herba...