Scientists do not always account for mosses, simple, small and ubiquitous plants in their climate models, even though doing so could help us better understand climate change.
Most plants are “vascular”. This means they can control the water entering or leaving their tissues via stomata, tiny pores in leaves and, sometimes, stems that allow gasses to enter and exit the plant. Mosses, however, have no stomata.
The goal of Rose Lefebvre’s Master’s research is to include mosses as a vegetation type in Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Canadian Land Surface Scheme Including Biogeochemical Cycles climate model – called CLASSIC for short.
Earlier this year Rose took Science Borealis‘ Pitch and Polish blog writing course and you can now read her full blog post – Tiny plants could be key to improving climate change predictions on the Science Borealis blog.
Rose is a student at the Université de Montréal under the supervision of Dr. Oliver Sonnentag (Université de Montréal) and Dr. Joe Melton (Environment and Climate Change Canada). Her research focuses on using the Canadian Land Surface Scheme including Biogeochemical Cycles model (CLASSIC) to reproduce the climatological conditions at Scotty Creek, in the Northwest Territories.
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