CREAFTalk with Rose Brinkhoff: Assessing the ability of LPJ-GUESS-HYD to predict water stress responses in boreal forests

Boreal forests are increasingly exposed to extreme heat and altered precipitation patterns, leading to periods of water stress that threaten their capacity to provide important ecosystem services. Management interventions can improve the resilience of forests to water stress, but our ability to implement these is contingent upon accurate identification of areas most susceptible to water stress. Recent advances in dynamic vegetation modelling have improved our ability to predict water stress responses in forests, including the integration of plant hydraulic processes into the ecosystem model LPJ-GUESS. Here, we evaluate the ability of this new adaptation, LPJ-GUESS-HYD, to detect water stress in three forests across Sweden. We identify periods of moderate, severe and extreme drought, and compare LPJ-GUESS-HYD carbon flux simulations with ICOS eddy-covariance flux data and satellite-based vegetation indices in drought and non-drought periods from 2015 to 2022.

Rose Brinkhoff's background is in plant ecology and ecophysiology. She completed her PhD in 2022 at the University of Tasmania, in Australia, where she explored the effects of nutrient supplementation on physiology, growth and stand dynamics on Eucalyptus nitens plantations through a series of field experiments. She then worked as a postdoc at the University of Michigan in the Institute for Global Change Biology until 2024. Her research there looked at the influence of climate warming and community composition change in a montane meadow system in the Rocky Mountains, particularly focusing on carbon fluxes and how they scale from the individual leaf to the ecosystem level. She has also worked in a Free-air CO2 enrichment (FACE) experiment, and in a forest evenness-productivity experiment.