Title: Hierarchical Modeling for Vegetation Dynamics
Presenting Author: Kamalika Das
Organization: USRA/NASA Ames
Co-Author(s): Marcin Szubert, Anuradha Kodali, Sangram Ganguly, Josh Bongard

Abstract:
The Amazonian forests are a critical component of the global carbon cycle, storing about 100 billion tons of carbon in woody biomass, and accounting for about 15% of global net primary production (NPP) and 66% of its inter-annual variability. There is a growing concern that these forests could succumb to precipitation reduction in a progressively warming climate causing extensive carbon release and feedback to the carbon cycle. In this study we build hierarchical models of climate vegetation dynamics that has the capability of spatially partitioning the Amazon forests into micro-systems such that each such partition has its own set of climatic descriptors regulating the tropical forest photosynthetic capacity. The hierarchical modeling is based on genetic programming based regression trees and has the ability to explain why certain areas of the rainforest have responded differently to the major droughts in recent times. We have also scaled this study to other tropical rainforests, namely the Congo basin in Africa, and the Indonesian rainforests and analyzed the similarities and differences of these identified partitions on a global scale.