Impacts of leaf traits on vegetation optical properties in Earth system modeling

Abstract

Quantifying surface energy and carbon budgets is essential for projecting Earth’s climate. Earth System Models (ESMs) typically simulate land surface processes based on plant functional types (PFTs), neglecting the diversity of plant functional traits or characteristics (PFCs; e.g., chlorophyll content and leaf mass per area). Here, we demonstrate substantial differences in modeled leaf optical properties (LOP) and surface albedo between traditional PFT-based and PFC-based approaches, particularly in tropical and boreal forests. We configure the canopy radiative transfer scheme in the Community Earth System Model using PFC-based LOP. This new configuration produces lower shortwave surface albedo in the tropics but higher albedo in boreal regions (>5 W m−2 radiative flux differences), and a weaker tropical but stronger boreal carbon sink. Through land-atmosphere coupling, the PFC-based configuration further alters atmospheric processes, leading to different temperature, cloud cover, and precipitation patterns. Our findings highlight the need to move beyond traditional PFT-based approaches in ESMs.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Wang, Y. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3729-2743 Braghiere, R.K. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7722-717X Fischer, W.W. Yao, Y. Shen, Z. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0444-4720 Schneider, T. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5687-2287 Bloom, A.A. Schimel, D. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3473-8065 Croft, H. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1653-1071 Winkler, A.J. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6574-4471 Reichstein, M. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5736-1112 Frankenberg, C. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0546-5857
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2025. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Keywords:	Carbon cycle; Climate and Earth system modelling
Dates:	Accepted: 16 May 2025 Published (online): 29 May 2025 Published: 29 May 2025
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > School of Biosciences (Sheffield)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	03 Jun 2025 14:25
Last Modified:	03 Jun 2025 14:25
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41467-025-60149-x
Related URLs:	Dataset
Sustainable Development Goals:
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:227332