Vegetation Dynamics And Global Change - Allen M. Solomon

The response of forests to global climate change is one of the
most hotly contested issues in the greenhouse effect debate. Much
effort
is being devoted to the construction of models which describe
the
function of the forests and their rate of change. There are a
wealth
of techniques available to project large-scale vegetation
patterns,
all based on different underlying models that contain
fundamental
biological
and ecological mechanisms. Vegetation
Dynamics and Global
Change will introduce both students and
professionals to the
sophisticated mathematical and computational
tools used to predict
the rate of change in the world's forests. It
emphasizes the
importance of scale in global studies. Leaders in the
field of
vegetation modeling cover physiological phenomena typically
measured
at small time and space scales; the stand dynamics of
forests;
large-scale models of forest dynamics; the reconstruction of
forest
vegetation of past climates as a way to understand current
global
changes; and the role of forests in the global carbon cycle.
Several
themes run through the book, including the need to understand
how
processes important at one time and space scale can be
conceptualized
at larger scales; the need to optimize the conceptual
benefits of
representing processes in detail and the attendant
difficulties of
estimating parameters and designing tests for
elaborate models; and
the need to identify the most appropriate
system variables.