I work to understand how terrestrial vegetation responds to changes in environmental and anthropogenic drivers and the feedbacks that may ensue, combining computational modelling and analysis of multi-scale observational data.
I work with a team of researchers based at Lund University in Sweden and at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
I work on a variety of questions related to the role of vegetation in the terrestrial carbon cycle. The primary tool for this work is the LPJ-GUESS dynamic global vegetation model. LPJ-GUESS has a particularly advanced representation of forest demography, facilitating work on the following topics: The role of tree mortality in forest carbon turnover…
A major focus of my work is constraining the rates and drivers of tree mortality at regional-global scales, with a view to answering major biogeographical questions and constraining the highly uncertain role of tree mortality in the carbon cycle. This work is funded by the TreeMort project which we lead. This aims to answer questions such as:…
I have participated in the Global Gridded Crop Model Intercomparison since its first phase in 2012, drawing together knowledge from across the crop modelling community to try and answer questions relating to how crop yields and water usage will develop under future climates. One important result has been the development of a new data-based method to project…
Thomas Pugh 