Terrestrial Ecosystems in Monsoon Asia: Scaling up from Shoot Module to Watershed

A GCTE core project “Global change impacts on terrestrial ecosystems in Monsoon Asia” (TEMA) has been carried out from 1995 to 2003. This chapter overviews the TEMA-employed unique approach of integrating across different scales, i.e., from a plant leaf to watershed budgets, targeting on the eastern Asian region. We particularly focused on the linkage between physiological processes of foliage canopy and landscape-scale processes of plant demography and plant community dynamics, where individual plant processes were integrated from physiology, and we projected the change in geographic pattern from individual plant processes. We evaluated the watershed unit where freshwater chemistry provides a signature of biogeochemical characteristics of terrestrial ecosystems. Stream chemistry controls the trophic condition of lake ecosystems, which can contribute to global change particularly through methane emission. Integration at the scale of watersheds will contribute, within the scope of the new GLP in relation to LOICZ, to the validation of the impact of environmental change on human society, and the impact of human activities on watershed-scale environments.