Using land surface models to explore and improve estimations of resilience of vegetation to droughts

• Ano de defesa: 2020
• Autor(a) principal: Hugo Tameirão Seixas
• Orientador(a): Elisabete Caria Moraes, Nathaniel Alan Brunsell
• Banca de defesa: David Montenegro Lapola, Gabriel de Oliveira
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE)
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Pós-Graduação do INPE em Sensoriamento Remoto
• País: BR
• Link de acesso: http://urlib.net/sid.inpe.br/mtc-m21c/2020/04.03.11.42

The concept of resilience can be helpful in describing the relationship between vegetation and climate, specially in a context of climate change. However, the quantification and characterization of resilience is a great challenge, due to the high complexity of this concept, and also the difficulty in comparing different ecosystems across the globe. Many studies were already made with the effort of creating methods which enables the comparison between different systems, however, there are still limitations, and there is still space to improve these methods. In order to explore the quantification of resilience of vegetation to drought, we performed a series of simulations by a land surface model (LSM) by manipulating climate data, which was used to estimate the resilience and its components over a dataset with high variation of precipitation regimes. These simulation were performed in the semi-arid region of Caatinga. We also performed an assessment of the LSM performance over the area, in order to give support to the resilience characterization by the model. Results shows that the model was able to represent annual fluxes of water, energy and carbon, and thus, it was possible to use its outputs to estimate the resilience.We also showed that the quantification of resilience can be represented as a function between precipitation variation with gross primary productivity (GPP), which enables a more detailed characterization of the resilience of the vegetation to droughts.