CREAFTalk with Iain Colin Prentice: Eco-evolutionary optimality for next-generation land-surface models

Eco-evolutionary optimality hypotheses make strong predictions about plant and ecosystem function, while plant functional ecology has generated large amounts of data that can be used to test such predictions. Drawing on these two strands, we are building a new structure for land-surface models that will be both simpler and more accurate than those currently in use for global climate and carbon-cycle modelling. Key breaks from earlier practice are (a) insistence that each process representation be tested independently; (b) avoidance of "end-of-pipe" parameter calibration; and (c) retiring the plant functional type concept. These developments have implications for ecosystem science: contradicting conventional wisdom as well as common model assumptions on the controls of photosynthetic capacity, the effect of temperature on respiration rate, how CO2 influences plant function, and how plants evade limitation by nutrients.

Iain Colin Prentice is a professor at Imperial College London, Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University. With a PhD in Botany from Cambridge University, he has held academic and research leadership positions in several countries including the Chair of Plant Ecology at Lund University, a founding Directorship of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, leadership of the NERC research programme Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System, and an AXA chair at Imperial College. He has held multiple roles in international science programmes, and led the first IPCC (WG1, TAR) chapter on the global carbon cycle.