Abstract for: Boreal Carbon Flux and Climate Feedbacks Under Global Warming: Ecosystem Disequilibrium and Tipping Points

It is likely that, with anthropogenic carbon emissions and rising temperatures, the vulnerable biological communities in the boreal region will fall out of equilibrium with the climate, resulting in a change in community makeup and function, and likely subsequent increases in carbon emissions, leading to further warming. Our model seeks to represent the possible outcomes of uncertain relationships and feedbacks between boreal vegetation and global climate change. Our goal is to use a system simulation approach to investigate the interactions between global temperature change, boreal carbon flux, and vegetational composition. The model, driven with anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane emissions data and validated with temperature and atmospheric CO2 data, simulates the feedbacks between temperature and vegetative dynamics for a variety of scenarios to identify possible inflection points for boreal carbon emission rates. While still unfinished, the preliminary results of historical model simulations and sensitivity analyses have made clear that the boreal region is indeed vulnerable to losing large amounts of carbon to increased soil and autotrophic respiration, especially in the case of high climate sensitivity and previous adaptation to the lower temperatures of the little ice age. I am intentionally leaving this space blank because I am submitting to the "work in progress" category. However, the system requires at least 30 words in each part of the structured abstract.