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  • Perspective
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Organizing principles for vegetation dynamics

Nature Plants volume 6, pages 444–453 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Plants and vegetation play a critical—but largely unpredictable—role in global environmental changes due to the multitude of contributing processes at widely different spatial and temporal scales. In this Perspective, we explore approaches to master this complexity and improve our ability to predict vegetation dynamics by explicitly taking account of principles that constrain plant and ecosystem behaviour: natural selection, self-organization and entropy maximization. These ideas are increasingly being used in vegetation models, but we argue that their full potential has yet to be realized. We demonstrate the power of natural selection-based optimality principles to predict photosynthetic and carbon allocation responses to multiple environmental drivers, as well as how individual plasticity leads to the predictable self-organization of forest canopies. We show how models of natural selection acting on a few key traits can generate realistic plant communities and how entropy maximization can identify the most probable outcomes of community dynamics in space- and time-varying environments. Finally, we present a roadmap indicating how these principles could be combined in a new generation of models with stronger theoretical foundations and an improved capacity to predict complex vegetation responses to environmental change.

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Fig. 1: Optimality model of CO2 and N availability effects in FACE experiments.
Fig. 2: CO2 uptake parameters predicted by an optimality principle.
Fig. 3: Modelling diverse communities based on evolutionarily stable strategies.
Fig. 4: Spatial self-organization in ecosystems.
Fig. 5: Vegetation distributions predicted by the principle of MaxEnt.
Fig. 6: Framework for the use of organizing principles in vegetation modelling.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the participants at the workshop titled ‘Next-generation vegetation modelling’, held at IIASA in March 2017: the idea for this Perspective arose from the insights and excitement engendered by the community discussion at that meeting. We also thank IIASA, both for their financial support of the workshop and for continued support thereafter. We particularly thank IIASA’s former Director and CEO, P. Kabat, for his unfailing support for the next-generation vegetation modelling initiative. O.F. acknowledges funding provided by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation. S.P.H. acknowledges the support from the European Research Council (ERC)-funded project titled ‘Global Change 2.0: Unlocking the past for a clearer future’ (GC2.0; grant no. 694481). This research is a contribution to the AXA Chair Programme in Biosphere and Climate Impacts and the Imperial College initiative on Grand Challenges in Ecosystems and the Environment (ICP). I.C.P. is supported by the ERC under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (REALM; grant no: 787203). We also thank the Labex OTMed (grant no. ANR-11-LABX-0061) funded by the French Government Investissements d’Avenir program of the French National Research Agency (ANR) through the A*MIDEX project (grant no. ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02). S.Z. was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (QUINCY; grant no. 647204). J. Bertram supplied Fig. 5. S.J.S. is supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) ATTRACT programme (A16/SR/11254288). M.L. was supported by the TULIP Laboratory of Excellence (ANR-10-LABX-41). P.C. and J.P. were supported by the ERC under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (IMBALANCE-P; grant no. ERC-SyG-2013-610028). P.C. acknowledges support from the CLAND institute of convergence of ANR in France (16-CONV-0003). I.J.W. was supported by the Australian Research Council (DP170103410). B.D.S. was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. PCEFP2_181115). S.M. is supported by the Swedish Research Councils VR (2016-04146) and Formas (2016-00998).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria

    Oskar Franklin, Åke Brännström, Ulf Dieckmann, Stephan Pietsch, Elena Rovenskaya & Florian Hofhansl

  2. Department of Forest Ecology and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Umeå, Sweden

    Oskar Franklin

  3. Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Sandy P. Harrison

  4. Plant Sciences Division, Research School of Biology, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Roderick Dewar

  5. Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research/Physics, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Roderick Dewar

  6. Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

    Caroline E. Farrior

  7. Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Åke Brännström

  8. Department of Evolutionary Studies of Biosystems, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai), Hayama, Japan

    Ulf Dieckmann

  9. Evolution and Ecology Research Centre, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Daniel Falster

  10. Institut Méditerranéen de Biodiversité et d’Ecologie Marine et Continentale (IMBE), Aix Marseille Université, CNRS, IRD, Avignon Université, Technopôle Arbois-Méditerranée, Aix-en-Provence, France

    Wolfgang Cramer

  11. Centre for Biodiversity, Theory, and Modelling, Theoretical and Experimental Ecology Station, CNRS, Moulis, France

    Michel Loreau

  12. Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modeling, Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Han Wang & I. Colin Prentice

  13. Forest Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Annikki Mäkelä

  14. Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Geosciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Karin T. Rebel

  15. Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Sede Boqer Campus, Israel

    Ehud Meron

  16. Department of Physics, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, Israel

    Ehud Meron

  17. Department of Environmental Research and Innovation, Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg

    Stanislaus J. Schymanski

  18. Department of Environmental Systems Sciences, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Benjamin D. Stocker

  19. CREAF, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain

    Benjamin D. Stocker & Josep Peñuelas

  20. Biogeochemical Integration Department, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany

    Sönke Zaehle

  21. Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Stefano Manzoni

  22. Bolin Centre for Climate Research, Stockholm, Sweden

    Stefano Manzoni

  23. Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH-Edinburgh), Bush Estate, Penicuik, UK

    Marcel van Oijen

  24. Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, North Ryde, New South Wales, Australia

    Ian J. Wright & I. Colin Prentice

  25. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, CEA CNRS UVSQ, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Philippe Ciais

  26. Environmental Biology Department, Institute of Environmental Sciences, CML, Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Peter M. van Bodegom & Nadejda A. Soudzilovskaia

  27. CSIC, Global Ecology Unit CREAF-CSIC-UAB, Bellaterra, Spain

    Josep Peñuelas

  28. Physical and Life Sciences Directorate, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, USA

    Cesar Terrer

  29. Department Botany & Zoology, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa

    Guy Midgley

  30. AXA Chair of Biosphere and Climate Impacts, Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London, Silwood Park Campus, Ascot, UK

    I. Colin Prentice

Authors
  1. Oskar Franklin
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  2. Sandy P. Harrison
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  3. Roderick Dewar
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  4. Caroline E. Farrior
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  8. Daniel Falster
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  9. Wolfgang Cramer
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  10. Michel Loreau
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  11. Han Wang
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  15. Stanislaus J. Schymanski
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  16. Elena Rovenskaya
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  17. Benjamin D. Stocker
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  18. Sönke Zaehle
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  19. Stefano Manzoni
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  20. Marcel van Oijen
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  21. Ian J. Wright
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  22. Philippe Ciais
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  25. Florian Hofhansl
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  26. Cesar Terrer
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  27. Nadejda A. Soudzilovskaia
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  28. Guy Midgley
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  29. I. Colin Prentice
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Contributions

O.F., S.P.H., Å.B., U.D., S.P., H.W., W.C., E.R. and I.C.P. contributed to the drafting of the paper; O.F. led the writing process; and R.D., C.E.F., D.F., M.L., H.W., I.C.P., K.T.R., Å.B., E.M. and O.F. contributed display items or specific sections. O.F., S.P.H., R.D., C.E.F., Å.B., U.D., S.P., D.F., W.C., M.L., H.W., A.M., K.T.R., E.M., S.J.S., E.R., B.D.S., S.Z., S.M., M.v.O., I.J.W., P.C., P.M.v.B., J.P., F.H., C.T., N.A.S., G.M. and I.C.P. contributed to the final version of the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Oskar Franklin.

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Table 1 and Supplementary References.

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Franklin, O., Harrison, S.P., Dewar, R. et al. Organizing principles for vegetation dynamics. Nat. Plants 6, 444–453 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-020-0655-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-020-0655-x

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