In the past two weeks, LPICEA Tiger Team held their second virtual workshop on a daily basis with Colin and Sandy on developing first-principle based vegetation models. LPICEA Tiger Team includes our PI Han Wang, our PhD students Shengchao Qiao, Huiying Xu and Ziqi Zhu, our newly coming PhD student Yanghan Ren from the Institute of Tibetan Plateau, CAS, and our ghost member Runxi Wang from Hongkong University.
As our long-term collaborators, Colin and Sandy had visited us for at least four weeks a year since 2018. We really enjoyed working with them together on either intensive field campaigns or brainstorming workshops. Although they can’t physically visit China anymore due to the pandemic, LPICEA continued their workshops by doing it online since last summer. Check out what happened in the first workshop from Sandy’s blog (https://research.reading.ac.uk/palaeoclimate/virtual-visit-to-the-tsinghua-tiger-team/).
During this second virtual workshop, we have been working on the analysis on the acclimation time-scale of dark respiration (Yanghang), continuing with the analyses of the climatic controls on leaf carbon to nitrogen ratio (Huiying xu) and on the vegetation greenness in Tibetean Planteau. We have also been finalizing the new analysis on predicting global wheat potential yield (Shengchao Qiao) and the manuscript on morphometric traits based on the China Plant Trait Database (Runxi). All those projects are related to the Eco-Evolutionary Optimality (EEO), which is the core concept of LPICEA’s researches. Check out more on EEO from our recently accepted paper (https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/nph.17558). EEO is recognized as one of the organization principles in natural, and has been shown to hold a great potential to providing parsimonious representations of core eco-physiological processes at leaf level. LPICEA is now exploring the predictability of EEO at an individual or ecosystem level. Yanghang would like to develop an EEO-based theory on plant maintenance respiration and incorporating this understanding into land surface model to improve the prediction on ecosystem carbon flux. Ziqi has been developing a theoretical framework to predict maximum foliage coverage from the principle of mass balance and the EEO-based Pmodel. Huiying is aiming to test the predictability of EEO on leaf carbon and nitrogen content at a mass basis. Shengchao has successfully developed a global crop model (PC model) by hybridizing Pmodel with a data-driven biomass allocation scheme. We showed that this new model can reproduce the observation based spatial pattern of wheat potential yield much better than the state-of-the-art process-based crop models. Shengchao’s work thus provides a strong evidence that ‘less is more’. We believe that LPICEA Tiger Team will collecting more and more such evidences with Colin, Sandy and all other LEMONTREE fellows!
LPICEA people really want to thank Colin and Sandy: Your supports and efforts make the past two weeks successful and productive! Now the Eastern Shore Jazz club is re-open. We hope we can enjoy the jazz music there all together in the near future!
By the way, you might want to know why it is called Tiger Team. FYI from sliwa insights:
