Respect-A2 from Field Scale Eco-Hydrological Process Understanding To Landscape Scale Water Fluxes

From A Hydrological Perspective, Many Land Surface Models (LSM) Have a Great Deficiencies in the Representation of Water-Related Feedback Mechanisms Induced Through Biotic, Climatic, Topographic and Hydrologic Landscape Features. This results in oversimplified Description of Hydrological Process, Effecting the Credibility of these models in simulating water fluxes (Scheiter, Langan & Higgins 2013; Clark et al. 2015). These Effects are specially pronounced in complex and Diverse Landscapes Like the tropical Mountain Rainforest of South Ecuador (Sakschewski et al. 2016). Building on Our Findings in the Phase I and the Overall Objectives of the Research Group In Phase II, We have identified Three Objectives for This Proposition: (1) Improve Our Eco-Hydrological Knowledge of Diverse Mountain Forest Systems, (2) Implement UNDERSTANDING INTO HUMBOL-TD AND DEVELOP METHODS FOR UPSCALING OF Field Scale ECO-HYDROLOGICAL PROCESS TO THE LANDSCAPE SCALE, AND (3) USE THE REVISED HUMBOL-TD TO TEST THE CENTRAL HYPOTHESES OF RESPONS Availability and Functional Trait Diversity. With Regard to the First Objective, We Will Extend Our Studies of the Below Ground Heterogeneity of Eco-Hydrological Processions in MRF to MDF. We Will Also Intelligy Our Work on The Field Scale in MRF Around the Different Flow Process and Their Effects on the Composition of the Stable Isotopes of Water. For This Purpose, We Will Sample Soil Water at Different Extraction Pressures and Thus Quantify The Mobility of the Soil Water. The Derceded Improved Process Understanding Will Be implemented and tested in lsmhydro (Djabelkhir et al. 2016) to match our second objective. This Better Eco-Hydrological Understanding of Plant Water Uptake, Mixing Process In The Vadose Zone and Runoff Generation Will Support Our Ambion to Scale Up From Fields To The Landscape. This Upscaling require Sophisticated Balance Balance Between Trade-offs induced by long model Run Times on Large Spatial Domains, The Wish to Be as Realistic as Possible With Regard To Considers Hydrological Process Understanding and Achieving A satisfactory model performance. As part of the second objective, We Will asefore set up and develop a semi-automatic testing of a number of different Hydrological Model structures in the sense of a rejectionist framework, where we finally Keep Those Structures on The Sub-Catchment Scale That OutperForm Others. The Third Objective Will Include Finally The Regional Application of Humbol-Dt, ITS APPLICATION TO VARIOUS CLIMATE CHANGE SCENARIOS AS well as natural and ANTHROPOGENIC REPLACEMENT SYSTEMS, AND THE DETAILED ANALYSES OF THE SIMULATED FUNCTIONAL TRAIT DIVERSITY Availability by LSMHYDRO.

OUT OF CALL – EXTERNAL FUNDS