ERC starting grant CATES

1.5 M€ to improve climate change projections using the memory of the world’s trees in 5 years (2022–2026)

Plain language project description here

Summary

Forests cover a third of the vegetated surface of the Earth and interact with global climate. These interactions are being altered by human activities at an unprecedented scale, both in their rate and in their geographical extent. At present, Earth system models (ESMs) struggle to predict how these climate-vegetation interactions will evolve in the future because of varied responses of the carbon cycle in their Land Surface Models (LSMs). This long-standing issue leads to widely varying atmospheric CO2 concentrations and hence varying climate projections under the same scenarios. LSM projections of forest biomass and carbon balance increasingly diverge over longer periods, thus limiting confidence in future climate projections. The goal of this project is to develop a new cross-disciplinary framework to constrain climate projections by jointly improving the simulation of forest growth and water use efficiency (WUE; the ratio of photosynthesis to transpiration) at long time scales (decades to century) using novel observational standards for historical growth and physiology derived from tree-ring data. The proposed work will bring into Earth System modelling decades of advances made by dendrochronologists around the world, providing at last a critical long-term constraint for the land surface modelling community as ice-cores are for global circulation models.

OPEN POSITIONS

We have two PhD positions open in CATES at this moment:

PHD STUDENTSHIPS

PhD studentship on Ecological modelling with ORCHIDEE. Extend the ability of a modern global land surface model to simulate forest growth and transpiration using tree-ring data in new ways. Join the CATES project to reduce uncertainties in Earth system feedbacks. Apply by May 13, 2024
PhD studentship in Root Dendrochronology. Expand the belowground forest research frontier using root growth rings. Help to uncover the hidden half of forests with CATES. Apply by May 13, 2024

INTERNSHIPS (students in France)

Modelling the future of ancient temperate rainforests under climate drying: This internship offers the opportunity to get involved in cutting-edge research on the impacts of climate change on ancient South American temperate rainforests, utilizing eddy-covariance flux measurements to implement and improve the land surface model ORCHIDEE, and contribute to our understanding of the future vulnerability of these threatened rainforests. For applications please email me with the subject “RAINFOREST”.
Ecological coding: Implementing a legacy model of tree growth ecology in python. Rewrite a fortran77 code of a tree-ring growth model into modern Python and test it in a supersite. Requires programming skills in python. For applications please email me with the subject “CODING”.

CATES IN THE GLOBAL MEDIA

BBC Climate Change (2023).

Aljazeera Planet SOS (2022).

BBC Newshour (2022).

The World US (2022).

RECENT TALKS

Discours au palais de l’Élysée (décembre 2023).

Invited Talk, 50th Anniversary of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Norwich, UK (2022).

Talk at the Tree-ring Lab, Tucson, Arizona (2022).