Orals

Land use and land cover change (LULCC) has the capacity to alter the climate by disrupting land-atmosphere fluxes of carbon, water and energy. Much attention has been devoted to the biogeochemical impacts of LULCC, yet there is an increasing awareness that the biogeophysical mechanisms should also be considered in climate change assessments of LULCC impacts on weather and climate. Characterizing biogeophysical land-climate interactions remains challenging due to their complexity and uncertainty. While from the biogeochemical perspective converting forest into grassland leads to warming the climate, from the biogeophysical side it typically entails a rapid increase in albedo and a concomitant decrease in evapotranspiration that may ultimately lead to a cooling or a warming effect, depending on which of the two processes dominates and depending on the size and pattern of the LULCC perturbation. Recent advances exploiting Earth system modelling and Earth observation tools are opening new possibilities to better describe LULCC and its effects at multiple temporal and spatial scales. This session welcomes studies that improve our general understanding of climate perturbations connected to LULCC from both biogeophysical and biogeochemical standpoints, and particularly those focusing on their intersection. Both observation-based and model-based analyses at local to global scales are welcome.