Modelling the risk of ecosystem disruption in Europe with a dynamic vegetation model

With unprecedented speed and extent, the projected climate change might lead to a disruption of terrestrial plants functioning in many regions. In the framework of the EcoChange project, the process-based dynamic vegetation model, CARAIB DVM (Dury et al., 2011, iForest 4, 82-99) was used to assess the transient vegetation response to climate change and identify threatened regions across Europe. The vegetation model was driven over 1951-2100 by the outputs of 4 climate models under different SRES scenarios: the ARPEGE/Climate model and 3 regional climate models from the European Union project ENSEMBLES. European vegetation was studied at the Bioclimatic Affinity groups scale as well as the species scale. The ability of the climate models to reproduce the present-day climate was evaluated comparing the interannual climate variability simulated by the models with the observed climate variability over 1961-1990 (CRU TS 3.0 dataset). Under the combined effects of projected changes particularly in temperature and precipitations, CARAIB simulates important reductions in the annual soil water content which have large impacts notably on net primary productivity and fire risk in the Mediterranean region but also in other parts of Europe. With this background, the species and biome distributions are projected to be strongly modified. Finally a quantitative index combining some CARAIB outputs evaluates the risk of ecosystem disruption in Europe.