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Abstract

Current Earth System Models (ESMs) prescribe plants that are static in time and  microbial traits that are static in both time and space, thus unrealistically limiting the range of ecosystem responses to environmental change. We hypothesize that ecosystem responses to a changing climate will be governed by changes in these traits and the costs associated with them. The shift in traits will occur through trait filtering; a fundamental process in ecological assembly of communities. In some cases this trait filtering process will lead to changes in biome boundaries, while in others it will lead to shifts in trait distributions within a single biome. Therefore, the next generation of ESM land models will need to evaluate plant and microbial traits and trade-offs relevant under rising atmospheric CO₂, elevated temperatures, changes in precipitation intensity and frequency, and changes in disturbance regimes. The cohort-based approach of ALM-ED we are developing for ACME, which includes plant competition and coexistence, and our recent modeling work on soil carbon and nitrogen biogeochemistry, are ideal platforms in which to develop explicit trait-filtering processes.

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