Building Virtual Ecosystems: Computational Challenges for Mechanistic Modeling of Terrestrial Environments Workshop, Germantown, Maryland, March 26–27, 2014
- Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
- Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA (United States)
- Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL (United States)
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
The mission of the Climate and Environmental Sciences Division of the Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) within the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science is “to advance a robust, predictive understanding of Earth’s climate and environmental systems and to inform the development of sustainable solutions to the nation’s energy and environmental challenges.” This formidable challenge requires quantification of stocks and controls on states, fluxes, and residence times of water, carbon, and other key elements through all components of the terrestrial system. These components include vegetation, soils, the deep vadose zone, groundwater, and surface water. To achieve this level of predictive understanding, a new generation of multiscale, multiphysics models is needed for terrestrial systems—models that incorporate process couplings and feedbacks between various “pools” (i.e., vegetation, soils, subsurface aquifers, and surface waters) across wide ranges of spatial and temporal scales. To explore the potential of a new generation of multiscale, multiphysics models for revolutionizing the understanding of terrestrial ecosystem dynamics, BER held the Computational Challenges for Mechanistic Modeling of Terrestrial Environments workshop on March 26–27, 2014, in Germantown, Maryland. The workshop brought together 29 researchers with diverse expertise, including hydrologists, environmental scientists, ecologists, microbiologists, plant scientists, and computational scientists. Through a combination of invited talks, breakout sessions, and report-back discussions, workshop attendees identified challenges and research opportunities needed to develop a more seamless and continuous framework for mechanistic modeling of terrestrial environments extending from the bedrock to the atmospheric boundary layer and from single-plant systems to fields of crops to watersheds and river basins.
- Research Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Washington, D.C. (United States). Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)
- OSTI ID:
- 1471498
- Report Number(s):
- DOE/SC-0171
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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