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Climate cannot be understood without the biosphere. Accordingly, different groups around the world have started to develop their climate models into Earth system models, that on top of climate physics also include representations of ecological processes and biogeochemical cycles. This development is supported by parallel advancements in other disciplines. During the last decade the remote sensing community has developed highly refined techniques for monitoring of ecosystem conditions and trends at very high spatial and temporal resolution. Meanwhile, the ecological community has started to assemble huge data sets of plant traits to develop a unified picture of the functioning of the terrestrial biosphere. In addition, different research groups have established large manipulation experiments to investigate biospheric changes following global warming and the increase in atmospheric CO2. These developments call for a new level of integration between modelers, developers of ecological theory and data gathering communities. The TERRABITES network is a cross-community initiative to join these efforts for improving the reliability of future combined climate-biosphere projections by accounting for recent progress in understanding, modeling and quantification of biospheric processes in the Earth system. Read More
