Subproject 9a:

Modeling ecosystem response to

climate and land use change

Abstract

In this subproject we focus on predicting vegetation changes and its consequences at the landscape and sub-catchment scale in the Jordan River Catchment (JRC). Our spatially explicit models integrate the detailed soil and vegetation information collected at the experimental sites and allow virtual experiments for many environmental conditions and over long periods, which is not feasible in the field. A cascading modelling approach ensures a continuous flow of information from the scale of individual plants to catchments in the models. By systematically varying landscape features in our simulations we can generalize of field results for other areas in the JRC and produce maps of potential semi-natural vegetation. In addition, we process time series of air photographs for studying the historic vegetation dynamics and validating our landscape models. Results from our simulations also serve as a validation for the project’s integrating WEAP model.