Informing Climate Change Studies Using Soil Survey Information.

Climatic factors will change future states of ecosystems. Earth system models (ESMs) are used to predict the future states of ecosystems and climate, and study the feedbacks between them. Soil survey produces wealth of soil information which has multiple uses including informing ESMs. In this presentation, we present results of several studies that use soil information to inform the land component of ESMs. In a model benchmarking study, we reported several ways to reduce the discrepancies between observations and model representations of active-layer thickness and soil carbon stocks. Our scaling study suggests that strengths of observed environmental controls weaken with scale and are only valid to specific spatial extent. Predicted variance of organic carbon stocks decreases exponentially with scale up to ~500m, and then becomes constant in Arctic/boreal ecosystems. These results can inform ESMs through 1) development of scaling functions of environmental controls and spatial heterogeneity, 2) development of mathematical representations of soil functions and processes, and 3) providing spatially representative observation/benchmarking sites.