Research

Ongoing projects

climate chambers with meascosms digged from Abisko, Sweden

Quantify heatwave and drought impacts on arctic shrubs:

We incubate three arctic shrubs in climate chambers under control and warming conditions and expose them to different strengths of heatwaves.  We examine how leaf phenology, photosynthesis and emissions of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) respond to warming and extreme conditions. 

(modified from Sporre et al., 2019)

Coupling LPJ-GUESS modelled BVOCs with chemistry module in EC-Earth3&4:

My development stays at the LPJ-GUESS side by extending LPJ-GUESS to model more than 100 compound species and also group these compounds species based on the targeted chemical scheme.  These grouped compound groups will be dynamically coupled into the EC-Earth 3 & EC-Earth 4 by Dr. Twan van Noije. 

This extension will open up many research opportunities to quantify the impacts of vegetation dynamics and plant physiological responses on changing  BVOC emissions and atmospheric chemical and physical variables. 

Photo credits  Tao Li ;  Per-Ola Olsson

Wong et al., 2012

Modelling the impacts of herbivory-induced BVOC emissions on atmospheric chemistry

We scaled up site-level measured relationships between herbivory defoliation and induced BVOC emissions over the Fennoscandian birch forest region. Regional daily defoliation data were extracted from satellite LAI. The satellite-based defoliation and BVOC responses to herbivory defoliation have been coupled BVOC emission model, MEGAN to simulate regional changes in BVOC emissions. On top of that, we further supply different emission outputs (with or without herbivory-induced emissions) to the meteorological-atmospheric chemistry coupled models, including WRF-Chem and WRF-CMAQ to assess herbivore-induced emissions on regional aerosol and cloud formation and radiation.

Canopy energy balance:

Together with a team of LPJ-GUESS developers, we are extending LPJ-GUESS to consider land surface energy balance, and radiative transfers (see Belda et al., 2022). This "land surface" version of LPJ-GUESS runs at a subdaily time scale and enables direct integration into an ESM.  

I am currently working with Dr.  David Belda to develop a "simplifier" version of the model considering canopy energy balance at a daily timescale.

Tang et al., 2019,  Figure 2.

Soil BVOC dynamics:

We have collected published soil BVOC measurement data and derived a few emissions dependencies on environmental variables.  

My master student Nick Zhang from the University of Stockholm is currently modelling soil BVOC emissions from one of the Swedish forest sites. 

Feel free to contact me if you have new measurement data or want to know more about the modelling :)


Preliminary results made by PhD student Shouzhi Chen

New plant phenology module in LPJ-GUESS:

Together with Prof. Fu's team from Beijing Normal University. we are currently adding a new phenology module to LPJ-GUESS. The whole development is divided into two stages: firstly,  we have selected phenological equations to be used to simulate spring and autumn phenology, and are currently obtaining equation parameters for different PFTs based on remote-sensing phenological indices, environmental variables and PFT distribution; then, we will add these equations into the LPJ-GUESS to calibrate at site levels and simulate at the regional and global scales. 

Upcoming projects