<p>Forest ecosystems world-over are going through rapid structural changes. These crown-scale changes may extend over large spatial domains. However, the consequences of changes to small-scale canopy structure are not currently incorporated in simulations. The goal of this work is to advance the modeling of transpiration and carbon assimilation in forest environments by incorporating a process-based parameterization of the individual-plant-level hydrodynamics for regional-scale modeling of transpiration, and CO2.</p><p>The hydraulic architecture of trees determines the movement of water through forest ecosystems into the atmosphere. Though hydraulic limitations to stomatal conductance and gas exchange in forest ecosystems are common, current models for transpiration do not dynamically resolve tree-scale hydraulics of trees and cannot take advantage of recent remote-sensing driven advances that measure tree-crown characteristics. The Finite-Elements Tree-Crown Hydrodynamics (FETCH) model provides a dynamic representation of tree hydraulics. This work will further develop FETCH, which can resolve midday stomatal closure, and other hydraulic-stress related phenomena. FETCH will be dynamically coupled with the Ecosystem Demography model (ED2) which resolves momentum, heat and gas exchange, and ecosystem dynamics in age-size structured statistically representative tree cohorts. Current methods for image analysis allow tree-crown detection and characterization from high resolution remote sensing images. Allometric relationships will be used to scale these into individual 3-D representations of the hydraulic systems of representative size cohorts. We propose to use this method to derive the effective tree-scale structures from IKONOS images, verified against explicit meter-scale lidar measurements. Extensive long-term data from the Duke Forest, Harvard Forest and UMBS will be used for parameterization of the system. Regional atmospheric simulations, driving the coupled ED-FETCH system will be used to estimate the impacts of satellite detected canopy-structure on hydrodynamic limitations to transpiration, and will provide a tool for simulations of canopy structure and forest management on carbon exchange at the ecosystem scale.</p>