College/Met Office CASE funded PhD Studentship in Mathematics: Modelling Vegetation Demography, Disturbance, and Carbon Storage in Forests

Location: Streatham Campus, University of Exeter, EX4 4QJ

Project Description:
Vegetation and soil is currently absorbing about a quarter of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. The land is therefore helping to slow-down climate change. However, the processes associated with this land carbon sink are sensitive to both climate and land-management.

Future climate mitigation pathways increasingly include forest management to offset fossil emissions. Carbon uptake in forests is particularly dependent on the distribution of tree ages and sizes, which is collectively known as ‘forest demography’. To better simulate the ways in which climate and land-use change affect the forest carbon sink, the University of Exeter has recently developed a model of forest demography called Robust Ecosystem Demography (RED).

The aim of this PhD studentship is to produce improved projections of future changes in the land carbon sink, accounting for changes in forest demography associated with land-use change and tree mortality. This will involve coupling RED to the Met Office land-surface scheme (JULES), and to models of tree mortality arising from fire and drought.

The PhD will interface strongly with a related Dynamic Vegetation Modelling project funded under the Climate Science for Service Partnership with Brazil programme, which is coordinated by the Met Office. This project will provide the basic coupled JULES-RED model along with a submodel to represent how the mortality of tall trees increases in drought conditions. In addition, the Met Office is developing a model of forest fire (INFERNO), which the student will couple to JULES-RED.

The student will set-up the new model to simulate the global vegetation distribution and carbon sink over the historical period (from 1850 to the current day). Results will be compared to ground-based inventory data (such as from USDA), and to forthcoming biomass estimates from remote-sensing.

Given the importance of the project to improving climate-carbon cycle projections, the Met Office has agreed to make this a CASE studentship, which entails an additional stipend of £8000 over the course of the PhD and significant interaction with experts at the Met Office (especially co-supervisor Dr Andy Wiltshire).

The successful candidate is likely to have a good degree (first or 2:1) in mathematics or a science discipline, and an aptitude for working with computational models.