A physiologically-based weather-driven geospatial modelling approach to global change biology: tackling a multifaceted problem with an interdisciplinary tool (GLOBALCHANGEBIOLOGY)

The GlobalChangeBiology project will provide important tools for summarizing, managing, and analyzing ecological data in agricultural systems to address global change effects using grape and olive as model systems. A major goal of this proposal is to link weather driven physiologically based Ecosystem Modelling (EM) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology with remote sensing data (RS) to bridge the gap between bottom-up (primarily physiological and population dynamics) and top-down (climatological) GIS approaches for assessing on ground ecosystem level problems. Grape and olive systems will be used as the basis for developing and implementing the EM/GIS system in the Mediterranean Basin region. Multivariate analyses will be used to summarize the main effect of model predictions in a space and time independent way to provide a solid but flexible basis for managing Mediterranean grape and olive systems in a changing global environment. The need for extensive weather datasets to drive the models will require that the EM/GIS technology be linked with remote sensing (RS) to enhance spatial resolution of the approach and increase its real-world applications. The integrated EM/GIS system will serve as a library of the current knowledge about grape and olive agroecosystems that can be extended to other systems, updated with new knowledge and used to help guide multidisciplinary research on local and regional scales. The combined innovative EM/GIS/RS tool will provide European governmental agencies with the scientific basis for developing policy required to adjust to global change including climate warming.