Colloquium: Thursday, 3 April, 1:20-2:35 pm, Classroom Bldg 306

Two-thousand years of Ecological Climatology and beyond

Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry

Jena, Germany

In this presentation I want to give a short overview over the past and recent progress of the science of Ecological Climatology and highlight current problems and future research questions. In particular, the following advances of Ecological Climatology will be addressed in this presentation and illustrated with research examples, such as the development

from philosophical and phenomenological to process-oriented approaches,
from static to dynamic-adaptive concepts,
from linear to non-linear modeling,
from vegetation-impact to vegetation-feedback oriented perspectives,
from “mean climatology” to approaches considering the importance of climate extremes,
from vegetation- to whole-ecosystem oriented views,
and in-terms of land-surface observation and modeling as well as model-data integration and scaling approaches.

I will conclude with a pledge for a stronger integration of across-scale observational, experimental and modeling approaches of various origins to gain new insight into the more-than-ever-important topic of Ecological Climatology.