Climate change is projected to cause regional shifts in temperature and precipitation, which will have dramatic and varied effects to the ecosystem services that various ecosystems can provide. In many cases we are only beginning to understand what those effects may look like. Often this uncertainty comes down to the complexity of linked ecosystem processes such as natural feedback loops. These effects can lead to unintuitive responses from ecosytems that occur in ways that we cannot directly observe. Ecosystem models give us a way to address these issues. By using our best mathematical understanding of how processes work we can base predictions on fundamentally realistic conditions, enabling us to investigate the natural world in ways that might otherwise be impossible to do.
This course will give students modeling tools that are helpful in addressing scientific questions around the response of ecosystems to shifts in climactic conditions. We will extensively look at the coupled regulatory ecosystem services of the water and carbon cycles and create models that can represent the linkages between the soil, vegetation, water, and atmosphere. Students will learn how to use differential equations to describe the above and belowground processes and will learn how to use numerical approaches to approximate solutions to these equations with the goal of simulating reality. We will take a deep dive into mechanistic modeling methods and students will use the skills gained through this class to program simple models and will complete a self-selected modeling project.