A stand-alone demography and landscape structure module for Earth system models
Abstract
We propose and demonstrate a new approach for the simulation of woody ecosystem stand dynamics, demography and disturbance-mediated heterogeneity suitable for continental to global applications and designed for coupling to the terrestrial ecosystem component of any earth system model (Haverd et al., 2013). The approach is encoded in a model called Populations-Order-Physiology (POP). We demonstrate the behaviour and performance of POP coupled to the Community Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange model (CABLE) for two contrasting applications: (i) to the Northern Australian Tropical Transect, featuring gradients in savanna vegetation cover, rainfall and fire disturbance and (ii) to a set of globally distributed forest locations coinciding with observations of forest biomass allometry. Along the Northern Australian Tropical Transect, CABLE-POP is able to simultaneously reproduce observation-based estimates of key functional and structural variables, namely gross primary production, tree foliage projective cover, basal area and maximum tree height. This application particularly demonstrates the ability of POP to quantify the contributions of drought and fire to tree mortality. Drought is manifested as an increase in mortality due to a decline in growth efficiency, while fires are treated as partial disturbance events, with tree mortality depending on tree size and fire intensity. In the application to global forests, POP is integrated with global forest data by calibrating it against paired observations of stem biomass and number density. The calibrated POP model is then coupled with CABLE and the coupled model is evaluated against leaf-stem allometry observations from forest stands ranging in age from 20 to 400 years. Results indicate that, in contrast to simulations from many global land surface models (Wolf et al., 2011), simulated biomass pools conform well with observed allometry. We conclude that POP, which can readily be coupled to the terrestrial carbon cycle component of any LSM, represents a significant advance in our ability to use in-situ and remotely sensed observations of biomass and individual level parameters (e.g. crown-size, tree-height, stem diameter) as constraints on the terrestrial carbon cycle. Haverd, V., B. Smith, G. Cook, P. Briggs, L. Nieradzik, S. Roxburgh, A. Liedloff, C. Meyer, and J. G. Canadell, A stand-alone tree demography and landscape structure module for Earth system models, submitted to Geophys. Res. Let., 2013 Wolf, A., P. Ciais, V. Bellassen, N. Delbart, C.B. Field, and J.A. Berry, Forest biomass allometry in global land surface models, Global Biogeochem. Cycles, 25, GB3015, doi:10.1029/2010GB003917, 2011
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUFM.B53C0472N
- Keywords:
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- 0414 BIOGEOSCIENCES Biogeochemical cycles;
- processes;
- and modeling;
- 0428 BIOGEOSCIENCES Carbon cycling;
- 0466 BIOGEOSCIENCES Modeling