Land management datasets: status and requirements for ESMs

Scope and aims

Content
Integrating land management (i.e., variations in practices and management intensity within the same land cover, in contrast to land cover change) in Earth System Models (ESMs) appears as a timely goal. Indeed, the high importance of land management change a primary driver of dynamics in biogeochemical and biophysical land surface properties and the effect of land management for feedbacks between the biosphere atmosphere have been shown in a previous TERRABITES workshop held in Potsdam in March 2012.

However, implementing land management in ESMs represents a formidable challenge. Although some of the necessary datasets exist, many others are not available at sufficient quality and quantity to be readily integrated in ESMs. Furthermore, the architecture of ESMs does currently not allow for the straightforward integration of land management information.

Aims
The aim of the Workshop is twofold:

• identify the current status of land management datasets: evaluate which datasets are available, what their uncertainties are, and how suitable these data are for model integration. Outline strategies to improve existing datasets and to identify key datasets that still need to be developed.
• identify opportunities and challenges for incorporating land management in ESMs: review how land management is currently represented in ESMs and identify low-hanging fruits which would yield notable benefits for a better integration of land management effects in ESMs.

Objectives

• Identification of “broker” variables for agriculture, grazing and forestry that can be described with global, spatially explicit land-use datasets. These datasets should (a) be directly linked to management, and (b) relevant for ES processes (e.g. a key variable of forestry might be canopy cover; this variable can potentially be linked to forest management and, on the other hand, related to energy fluxes, etc.).
• Identification of data and knowledge gaps that hamper progress.
• Development of a (detailed) roadmap on how the currently available data could be used and/or extended to derive useful products for enhancing the global modeling capabilities

In order to address the challenge, WG4 of the Cost Action TERRABITES organizes an interdisciplinary, cross-cutting workshop, bringing together experts from the Earth-System-Modeling and Global Land Science communities.