Predicting life in the Earth system: Linking ecological observations with modeling tools

Terrestrial ecosystems are an integral component of the Earth system, governing the exchange of energy, water, and greenhouse gases between Earths land surface and atmosphere. They provide numerous services for society, including climate regulation and mitigation. Despite the critical role of terrestrial ecosystems within the Earth system, interactions between ecology and geoscience fields have historically been limited, specifically in the context of bringing ecological insights into the development and evaluation of Earth system models. Tools that integrate measurements and models of terrestrial ecosystems for weather, climate, and Earth system science can help to reduce disciplinary silos, advance macroscale ecology, and build scientific understanding of the Earth as a coupled system. We present a new tool that uses a containerized version of the Community Land Model (CLM) connected to observations from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), enabling near real time terrestrial ecosystem modeling at NEON sites. Gap-filled flux tower meteorology and site-level characteristics are processed and available for all NEON tower sites. The NEON data are used within CESM-Lab, a containerized modeling system, which provides the entire workflow to run CLM simulations for NEON sites on a laptop, local clusters, or a cloud-based server. The containerized CESM-Lab also includes sample analysis scripts that facilitate comparing CLM projections with NEON observations. We highlight how the CLM simulations at NEON towers provide data to help constrain processes, augment available measurements, and test hypotheses of ecosystem-atmosphere coupling. This tool will enable new scientific discovery and innovation across ecology and geoscience communities.