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Maria Isabel Arce-Plata

Natural ecosystems store large amounts of carbon globally, as organisms absorb carbon from the atmosphere to build large, long-lasting, or slow-decaying structures such as tree bark or root systems. An ecosystem’s carbon sequestration potential is tightly linked to its biological diversity. Yet when considering future projections, many carbon sequestration models fail to account for the role biodiversity plays in carbon storage. Here, we assess the consequences of plant biodiversity loss for carbon storage under multiple climate and land-use change scenarios. We link a macroecological model projecting changes in vascular plant richness under different scenarios with empirical data on relationships between biodiversity...
Abstract (from Environmental Modelling & Software): Models help decision-makers anticipate the consequences of policies for ecosystems and people; for instance, improving our ability to represent interactions between human activities and ecological systems is essential to identify pathways to meet the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. However, use of modeling outputs in decision-making remains uncommon. We share insights from a multidisciplinary National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center working group on technical, communication, and process-related factors that facilitate or hamper uptake of model results. We emphasize that it is not simply technical model improvements, but active and iterative stakeholder...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
Abstract (from BioScience): Global biodiversity and ecosystem service models typically operate independently. Ecosystem service projections may therefore be overly optimistic because they do not always account for the role of biodiversity in maintaining ecological functions. We review models used in recent global model intercomparison projects and develop a novel model integration framework to more fully account for the role of biodiversity in ecosystem function, a key gap for linking biodiversity changes to ecosystem services. We propose two integration pathways. The first uses empirical data on biodiversity–ecosystem function relationships to bridge biodiversity and ecosystem function models and could currently...
Categories: Publication; Types: Citation
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Carbon sequestration and biodiversity are tightly linked, but many models projecting carbon storage change do not account for the role biodiversity plays in the sequestration capacity of terrestrial ecosystems. Here, we link a macroecological model projecting changes in vascular plant richness with empirical biodiversity-biomass stock relationships, to assess the consequences of plant biodiversity loss for carbon storage under multiple climate and land-use change scenarios. Data presented here include global raster files of plant species loss by ecoregion, biomass loss by ecoregion, and carbon loss by ecoregion. Estimates are what is expected over the long term, when ecosystems approach their new equilibrium states,...
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