Ecohydrologic and biogeochemical process networks in forest ecosystems in monsoon east asia: Identification and interpretation

Forest ecosystems play a critical role in the cycles of carbon and water from local to global scales. These cycles and their variability, in turn, play an important role in the non-trivial emergent and self-organizing interactions between forest ecosystems and their environment. Observational evidence, based on micrometeorological eddy covariance measurements, suggests that heterogeneity and disturbance (both human and natural) in forest ecosystems in monsoon East Asia may facilitate to build resilience for adaptation to change. Yet, the principles that characterize the role of variability in these interactions remain elusive. A process network is defined as a network of feedback loops and the related time scales, which describe the magnitude and direction of the flow of energy, matter, and information between the different variables in a complex system. We attempt to delineate and interpret such process networks by analyzing multivariate ecohydrologic and biogeochemical time series data based on information flow statistics.