A novel method for assessing climate change impacts in ecotron experiments
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ORIGINAL PAPER
A novel method for assessing climate change impacts in ecotron experiments Inne Vanderkelen1 · Jakob Zscheischler2,3 · Lukas Gudmundsson4 · Klaus Keuler5 · Francois Rineau6 · Natalie Beenaerts6 · Jaco Vangronsveld6,7 · Sara Vicca8 · Wim Thiery1,4 Received: 27 March 2020 / Accepted: 4 June 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Ecotron facilities allow accurate control of many environmental variables coupled with extensive monitoring of ecosystem processes. They therefore require multivariate perturbation of climate variables, close to what is observed in the field and projections for the future. Here, we present a new method for creating realistic climate forcing for manipulation experiments and apply it to the UHasselt Ecotron experiment. The new methodology uses data derived from the best available regional climate model projection and consists of generating climate forcing along a gradient representative of increasingly high global mean air temperature anomalies. We first identified the best-performing regional climate model simulation for the ecotron site from the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment in the European domain (EURO-CORDEX) ensemble based on two criteria: (i) highest skill compared to observations from a nearby weather station and (ii) representativeness of the multi-model mean in future projections. The time window is subsequently selected from the model projection for each ecotron unit based on the global mean air temperature of the driving global climate model. The ecotron units are forced with 3-hourly output from the projections of the 5-year period in which the global mean air temperature crosses the predefined values. With the new approach, Ecotron facilities become able to assess ecosystem responses on changing climatic conditions, while accounting for the co-variation between climatic variables and their projection in variability, well representing possible compound events. The presented methodology can also be applied to other manipulation experiments, aiming at investigating ecosystem responses to realistic future climate change. Keywords Regional climate model · Climate forcing · Controlled environment experiment · Global warming · Ecosystem response
Introduction Ecosystem climate change experiments are one of the key instruments to study the response of ecosystems to a change in climate. There are primarily four different factors that are altered in such experiments: air temperature, precipitation, CO2 concentration, and nitrogen deposition (Curtis and Wang 1998; Rustad et al. 2001; Lin et al. 2010; Wu et al. 2011; Knapp et al. 2018). More recently, multi-factor
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00484-020-01951-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Inne Vanderkelen
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Extended author information available on the last page of the article.
experiments are starting to emerge. In those experiments, different combinations of the four main drive
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