Felix Leung
Department: Physical Geography
Research Centre/Unit: Climate Change Modelling
Project Summary
Tropospheric ozone (O3) is the third most important anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas and is detrimental to plant productivity. Ozone already causes significant crop production losses (5 Billion $ per year in US, similar in EU) with concentrations increasing in South Asia and South East Asia, which have significant agricultural areas and large, growing populations. The aim of this research is to quantify the impacts of present-day and future tropospheric O3 on crop production at the regional scale until 2050, using the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator adapted to include the major global crop types (JULES-crop). JULES forms the land surface component of the latest generation Earth System Model (ESM) at the Hadley Centre. Partnership with the Met Office allow me to consider the impacts of tropospheric O3 on crop production, land biogeochemistry and biophysics in an Earth System context, in a fully consistent manner. A major focus of this research will be to further develop and apply JULES-crop to include O3 impacts on crops. JULES-crop will be extensively evaluated against the Soybean Free-Air-Concentration-Enrichment experiment (http://soyface.illinois.edu/ ). JULES-crop will be applied in a coupled ESM to quantify feedbacks between coupled climate-crops and atmospheric chemistry. The project will thus help to build a state-of-the-art impact assessment model, and contribute to a more complete understanding of the impacts of climate change on food production.
Supervisory Team
This is a NERC CASE studentship between the University of Exeter (Prof. Stephen Sitch, Prof. Peter Cox) and Met Office Hadley Centre (Dr Jemma Gornall and Dr Andy Wiltshire).
Prof. Stephen Sitch
Stephen built the Lund-Potsdam-Jena Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (LPJ-DGVM), which builds upon the groups earlier models from the BIOME family. Stephen worked at the UK Met Office Hadley Centre on the interactions between land ecosystems, climate and atmospheric chemistry and is actively involved in the further development of the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) and the Hadley Centre Earth System model (HadGEM2-ES). He is currently the JULES theme leader of Vegetation Dynamics and Disturbance.
Prof. Peter Cox
Professor of Climate System Dynamics within Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Exeter. Theme Leader for Climate Change & Sustainable Futures. Until September 2006, Prof Cox was the Science Director - Climate Change at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, and prior to that he was at the Hadley Centre for Climate prediction and Research (1990-2004).
Dr Jemma Gornall and Dr Andy Wiltshire
Climate Impacts Scientist at The Met Office
Wider Research Interests
- Role of atmospheric microorganism in the climate system http://www.livescience.com/2333-earth-clouds-alive-bacteria.html
- Risk of pandemic avian flu caused by climate change http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16577612
- How urban ecology help reduce the impact of climate change Impacts of climate change on pest outbreak
- Ecosystem responses to climate change and human activities
- Relationship between climate and cliodynamics Evolution of plant phenology respond to climate
- Benefit of Ecotourism to environment and society
- Tree rings divergence problem
Authored Publications/Reports
N. Barsoum, Lauren Fuller, Francis Ashwood, Katy Reed, Anne-Sophie Bonnet-Lebrun, Felix Leung (21st October 2013) Ground-dwelling spider (Araneae) and carabid beetle (Coleoptera: Carabidae) community assemblages in mixed and monoculture stands of oak (Quercus robur L./Quercus petraea (Matt.) Liebl.) and Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.), Forest Ecology and Management , http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2013.08.063
Andreas Krause, Thomas A. M. Pugh, Anita D. Bayer, Wei Li, Felix Leung et al (2018) Large uncertainty in carbon uptake potential of land‐based climate‐change mitigation efforts. , Global Change Biology, 24(7), 3025-3038
Wei Qi, Junguo Liu, Felix Leung (15th January 2019) A framework to quantify impacts of elevated CO2 concentration, global warming and leaf area changes on seasonal variations of water resources on a river basin scale., Journal of Hydrology, 570, 508-522
Katrin Fleischer, Anja Rammig, Martin G. De Kauwe, Anthony P. Walker, Tomas F. Domingues, Lucia Fuchslueger, Sabrina Garcia, Daniel S. Goll, Adriana Grandis, Mingkai Jiang, Vanessa Haverd, Florian Hofhansl, Jennifer A. Holm, Bart Kruijt, Felix Leung, Belinda E. Medlyn, Lina M. Mercado et al. (12th September 2019) Amazon forest response to CO2 fertilization dependent on plant phosphorus acquisition, Nature Geoscience, 12, 736-741
Felix Leung, Amos P. K. Tai, Jacky Y. S. Pang, Timothy Lam, Donald K. C. Tao, Katrina Sharps (7th March 2020) ) Evidence of ozone-induced visible foliar injury in Hong Kong using Phaseolus vulgaris as a bioindicator, Atmosphere, 11(3), 266
Felix Leung, Karina Williams, Stephen Sitch, Amos P.K. Tai, Andy Wiltshire, Jemma Gornall, Elizabeth A. Ainsworth, Timothy Arkebauer, David Scoby (7th December 2020) ) Calibrating soybean parameters in JULES from the US-Ne2/3 FLUXNET sites and the SoyFACE-O3 experiment, Geoscientific Model Development, 13, 6201–6213
