PROPAGATING UNCERTAINTY FROM PLANT TRAITS TO ECOSYSTEM DYNAMICS IN A DRY TROPICAL FOREST

Abstract

Seasonally dry tropical forests are an understudied biome, and poorly constrained plant functional traits contribute to uncertainty in terrestrial biosphere models’ representations of ecosystem dynamics and predictions of ecosystem response to environmental change. I perform simulations in the Ecosystem Demography model 2 (ED2) to assess how uncertainty associated with plant functional traits in tropical dry forests propagates to uncertainty in (1) ecosystem productivity and composition, and (2) ecosystem response to nutrient addition and drought. I find that ecosystem nutrient limitation status depends on community plant traits and parameterization of environmental nutrient loss processes. Furthermore, incorporating possible relationships between poorly constrained traits and well-constrained traits can produce ecosystem dynamics outside the range of those predicted by a sensitivity study where poorly constrained traits are held constant across plant types.