Purpose of the Research Project
Mitigation of devastating global environment change is critical for achieving the sustainable society. The biosphere plays unique roles in the energy and biogeochemical cycles and shows remarkable adaptability and resilience against climate changes. The goal of the research project is to develop a set of mitigation options of global environmental change by utilizing the biospheric functions.
The biosphere encapsulates a wide range of hierarchical scales from genome, cell, organ, individual, community, ecosystem, and biome, and therefore investigated by difference scientific fields such as molecular biology and ecology. On the other hand, recent advancements such as genome analysis and Earth observation provide an increasing amount of information at micro to macro scales, allowing us, in conjunction with data science, to elucidate the biospheric functions in an innovative manner.
The Research Area aims at developing a new scientific field, called the integrated biospheric science, through interdisciplinary collaborations in relation to biospheric functions. It develops a novel global model, called the digital biosphere, to integrate diverse findings. Focusing on overarching issues on global change mitigation, i.e., CO2 sequestration, biomass production, and land use, this Research Area intends to give quantitative answers to support establishment of the sustainable society.
Expected Research Achievements and Scientific Significance
Establishment of the integrated biospheric science by the Research Area is expected to enhance interdisciplinary collaborations and capacity building. Deepening insights into the biosphere provides useful outcomes to mitigation, adaptation, and nature-based solutions. The new model, the digital biosphere, is anticipated to allow us performing high-resolution simulations of the biospheric functions (CO2 uptake and biomass supply), which are useful to prevent the global environmental change.
Newsletters
The Research Area publishes a newsletter summarizing our research and introducing our researchers. Please contact our office if you would like to be notified of the latest issue or to subscribe.
Past issues of the newsletter are available in PDF format. For details, please see the Newsletter page(Japanese ONLY).