Research Unit Leaders: Maria Vincenza Chiriacò and Valentina Mereu 

This research line is dedicated to the design, development and testing of modeling approaches, with different complexity, to reproduce feedback between climate and terrestrial ecosystems – the latter considered as a mosaic of natural environments and human-managed systems, including inland freshwater bodies – and among their connected components (soil, water, vegetation), related functions and services. The adopted approaches include: climate-based indicators or indices, empirical functions, process-based models or “hybrid” methods, and statistical tools up to machine learning (ML) algorithms.

Research Unit Leaders: Marta Debolini and Roberta Padulano

This research line focuses on designing, developing and implementing frameworks and tools that integrate multiple feedbacks across numerous environmental and socio-economic dimensions, especially concerning the multi-sectoral competition for water resources and land systems. The research is applied at various scales (e.g., farm to watershed, landscape to region), considering climate change and other global drivers, land use dynamics in particular, in order to assist and implement new adaptation pathways  and new forms of ecosystem conservation, land governance, and water management across sectors, and the broad concept of water security.

Research Unit Leaders: Serena Marras and Dario Papale

This research line aims at measuring carbon and water cycles as well as ecosystems responses to climate change and other stresses. Synergistic monitoring platforms and networks (in-situ to remote) will provide detailed data on which applying innovative data integration and post-processing chains to assess interconnected ecosystems dynamics, identify plant functional and structural traits, quantify biodiversity aspects and then infer interactions with abiotic (e.g., climate, fires) and biotic (e.g., pests, diseases) factors.

Research Unit Leaders: Monia Santini and Antonio Trabucco

This research line gathers elements of all the previous research lines (producing, among other, data, indicators, models, new workflows for data integration and post-processing) to contribute to some key aspects of the Copernicus and DestinE initiative, taking also opportunities from Earth Observation, up to develop advanced modules to reproduce, and then predict/project, the behavior of ecosystem components under climate change, extreme events (e.g. droughts) and disturbances (e.g. fires), as well as under alternative management options.