Coupled Modelling of Vegetation-Hydrology Dynamics

Water and vegetation dynamics are strongly interrelated: water availability affects biomass production, vegetation distribution and the type of vegetation, which in turn influences the infiltration capacity, evapotranspiration and runoff. Understanding this interrelation is needed to develop tools for a more sustainable use of water resources and management of natural ecosystems.

In recent decades, dynamic vegetation models have emerged as a powerful tool for quantifying ecosystem dynamics in response to hydrological processes. The major difficulty of coupling vegetation and hydrology dynamics is to depict the complexity and spatiotemporal variability of natural ecosystems. Existing vegetation-hydrology models tried to capture the essential dynamics of ecosystems by modelling few key plant species or subjective plant functional types. However, this simplification restricts the models to predefined trait combination and trade-offs.