How do Trees Grow in a Non-Stationary Climate? (25rit032)

The Banff International Research Station will host the "How do Trees Grow in a Non-Stationary Climate?" workshop in Banff from March 9 to March 16, 2025.

Trees are complex organisms whose woody structures play key roles in regulating the planet's climate, host a significant fraction of the world's biodiversity, and provide humans with a critical renewable resource. Understanding and predicting how trees will grow on a rapidly warming planet is thus of paramount importance. Despite extensive continental-scale data on internal (tree cores) and external (tree diameter) proxies of tree growth, and decades of analyses of these data, we still lack models that accurately capture the key features of tree growth and its response to climate change. The advent of open data, which has provided unparalleled new access to global information on tree growth, development of new sophisticated statistical tools, and increasing computing power - together with rapidly accelerating climate change make this the time to address this challenge.

Bringing together tree biologists and computational statisticians from different countries and career stages, our Research in Teams proposes to develop mechanistic models of tree growth that can accommodate these newly available extensive and complex data streams with full uncertainty to provide robust forecasts of tree growth. These in turn can improve our forecasts of forest regeneration, fire cycles and carbon sequestration, and thus climate change itself. Together, these improved forecasts can help us better prepare and adapt to climate change.

The Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery (BIRS) is a collaborative Canada-US-Mexico venture that provides an environment for creative interaction as well as the exchange of ideas, knowledge, and methods within the Mathematical Sciences, with related disciplines and with industry. The research station is located at The Banff Centre in Alberta and is supported by Canada's Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and Alberta's Advanced Education and Technology.