Background. In my research, I take a process based approach to understand how ecosystem dynamics arise from mechanisms that act on individuals. Any individual plant can encounter a wide variety of climatic conditions, have to compete with other plants for resources, and have to defend themselves from attack by pests and diseases. Because of their sessile nature, plants have to detect and respond to all these possible environments, shaping their form and function. To understand how these interactions between plants and their environment drive ecosystem dynamics, I employ a mechanistic modelling approach called functional-structural plant modelling. This approach explicitly models individual plants in 3D, recreating the heterogeneity that characterises natural systems.
This Project. For the Climate-Smart Forestry Project, I am developing a 3D forest model 3D forest model that is designed to predict the impact of management interventions under future climatic conditions, especially in increasingly hot and dry summers. To make sure the model gives reliable predictions, we make a virtual replicate of our experimental forests and validate the growth of the virtual trees to the growth of the real trees, measured using the dendrometer and tree rings
Climate Smart Forestry 