Because of the slow pace of terrestrial ecosystem processes, including the slow generation time, growth rate, and decomposition rate of trees, the impact of changing climate and disturbance on forests plays out over hundreds of years. For this reason, centennial scale projections of terrestrial ecosystem models are used to anticipate the trajectory of forest response to environmental change. Modelers would like to have data on how forests have changed at regional scales and over hundreds of years to help assess such projections. A rich assemblage of relevant paleoecological data has been collected, but they have not been synthesized into a form that can be incorporated into broad-scale modeling efforts. Funding provided will support the establishment of a paleoecological observatory network (PALEON) to address this challenge. PALEON is an interdisciplinary team of paleoecologists, environmental statisticians, and ecosystem modelers with the goals of producing rigorous and robust reconstructions of forest change from the Atlantic to the Great Plains over the past 2,000 years, and then using these reconstructions to validate and improve the predictions of terrestrial ecosystem models.
PALEON has identified the integrated analysis of paleoecological data with statistical and mechanistic modeling as a key challenge for improving research capacity for anticipating the future of environmental change. For this reason, PALEON incorporates interdisciplinary training and community building into all aspects of the PALEON mission. In addition to focused working groups, PALEON works with relevant disciplinary communities to develop common approaches to data collection, analysis, and experimental protocols to ensure that long-term data can be seamlessly integrated into macroscale ecosystem analyses. Interdisciplinary training of post-doctoral fellows and graduate students, including a summer short course, will ensure that the next generation of researchers thinks naturally at the spatial and temporal scales relevant to understanding the broad scale impact of changing climate and land-use disturbance.
