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A new model for simulating climate change and carbon dynamics in forested landscapes

Authors:
The forest science community welcomed a new simulation model on August 1, 2012.
The model will help natural resource managers understand the effects of a changing
environment on forests, including carbon dynamics and the availability of dead wood
habitat. Forest Carbon Succession v1.0 (ForCSv1—nicknamed “Forks”) is an extension
within the LANDIS-II family of models. ForCSv1 maintains all the functionality of LAN-
DIS-II, while adding the calculations of forest carbon dynamics. Using the model, forest
managers can explore what-if scenarios, assess management or offset project ideas, and
identify opportunities to reduce risks.
LANDIS-II is a popular forest modelling platform that simulates spatially-explicit for-
est succession, disturbance (including fire, wind, harvesting, and insects), climate change,
and seed dispersal across large landscapes. It tracks the spatial distribution of tree and
shrub species and simulates multi-species and multi-age stands. Its approach to software
development allows for rapid model improvements, easy distribution, and an online user
community. LANDIS-II has been applied worldwide, including in Canada, such as in Nova
Scotia (Steenberg et al. 2011) and Labrador (Sturtevant et al. 2007).
In 2008, Caren Dymond identified a need for a freely available model to simulate cli-
mate change impacts on forest carbon dynamics, including the feedback of
changing vegetation on management and disturbances. She assessed the
available options and realized that there was an opportunity to bring to-
gether the existing forest ecosystem models of LANDIS-II (Scheller and
Mladenoff 2004) and the Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sec-
tor v3 (Kurz et al. 2009). The gurus of the two models (Dr. Rob Scheller
and Dr. Werner Kurz) were willing to collaborate with Dymond on the proj-
ect. After obtaining funding from the BC Forest Service, Dymond was able to hire Sarah
Beukema and ESSA Technologies to provide both programming and scientific expertise.
The release of the model did not occur until 2012 as the project required more work than
was anticipated.
The ForCsv1 program includes growth, mortality, decay, and disturbance impacts.
ForCsv1 allows users to track carbon in five pools for each living age-species cohort, plus
nine dead organic matter and soil pools for each species. In addition to the carbon storage
in pools, the extension reports on Total Net Primary Productivity, Heterotrophic Respira-
tion, Net Ecosystem Productivity, Net Biome Productivity, and transfers to the forest prod-
1
A New Model For Simulating Climate Change and
Carbon Dynamics in Forested Landscapes
Dymond, C.C., Scheller, R.M., & Beukema, S. 2012. A New Model For Simulating Climate Change and
Carbon Dynamics in Forested Landscapes. Journal of Ecosystems and Management 13(2):1–2.
Published by FORREX Forum for Research and Extension in Natural Resources.
http://jem.forrex.org/index.php/jem/article/viewFile/209/465
JEM
Vol 13, No 2
J O U RN A L O F
Ecosystem s &
Management
1
Caren Christine Dymond, British Columbia Ministry of Forests, Lands, and Natural Resource
Operations; Robert M. Scheller, Portland State University; & Sarah Beukema, ESSA
Technologies Ltd.
LINK
News
ForCSv1 will help forest
managers better understand
the effects of a changing
environment, including
carbon dynamics.
ucts sector caused by harvesting. The extension allows the user considerable flexibility
in adjusting the disturbance impacts on carbon pools.
ForCSv1 has been tested successfully on a site on Vancouver Island, with other sites
in British Columbia currently in progress. The model is freely available for download at
http://www.landis-ii.org.
Websites
http://www.landis-ii.org
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/landis-ii-users
https://sites.google.com/a/pdx.edu/dynamic-ecosystems-landscape-lab/home
References
Kurz, W.A., C.C Dymond, T .M. White, G. Stinson, C. H. Shaw, G. J. Rampley, C. Smyth, B. N. Simpson, E. T.
Neilson, J. A. Trofymow, J. Metsaranta, & M. J. Apps. 2009. CBM-CFS3: A model of carbon-dynamics
in forestry and land-use change implementing IPCC standards. Ecological Modelling 220:480–504.
Scheller, R. M. & D. J. Mladenoff. 2004. A forest growth and biomass module for a landscape simulation
model, LANDIS: Design, validation, and application. Ecological Modelling 180(1):211–229.
Steenberg, J.W.N., P.N. Duinker, & P.G. Bush. 2011. Exploring adaptation to climate change in the forests
of central Nova Scotia, Canada. Forest Ecology and Management 262: 2316–2327.
doi:10.1016/j.foreco.2011.08.027
Sturtevant, B. R., A. Fall, D. D. Kneeshaw, N. P. P. Simon, M. J. Papaik, K. Berninger, F. Doyon, D. G. Morgan,
& C. Messier. 2007.A toolkit modeling approach for sustainable forest management planning:
Achieving balance between science and local needs.Ecology and Society 12(2):7.
Author information
Caren C. Dymond – Research Scientist, British Columbia Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource
Operations. Victoria, BC. Email: Caren.Dymond@gov.bc.ca
Robert Scheller – Assistant Professor, Environmental Sciences and Management, Portland State University,
Portland, Oregon. Email: rmschell@pdx.edu
Sarah Beukema – Senior Systems Ecologist, ESSA Technologies Ltd, Vancouver, BC. Email: sbeukema
@essa.com
JEM
Vol 13, No 2
2
A NEW MODEL FOR
SIMULATING
CLIMATE CHANGE
AND CARBON
DYNAMICS IN
FORESTED
LANDSCAPES
Dymond, Scheller,
& Beukema
J O U RN A L O F
Ecosyst ems &
Management
... Coupled with remotely sensed data and strategic-level forest inventories, researchers have developed sophisticated models to estimate spatial-temporal distributions of forest C stocks (Dymond et al., 2002;Yan and Zhao, 2007;Kurz et al., 2009;Liang and Zhou, 2014). For example, a ForCSv2 (Forest Carbon Succession v2.0) extension for the LANDIS-II model has been applied to simulate spatially-explicit forest C succession (Dymond et al., 2002). ...
... Coupled with remotely sensed data and strategic-level forest inventories, researchers have developed sophisticated models to estimate spatial-temporal distributions of forest C stocks (Dymond et al., 2002;Yan and Zhao, 2007;Kurz et al., 2009;Liang and Zhou, 2014). For example, a ForCSv2 (Forest Carbon Succession v2.0) extension for the LANDIS-II model has been applied to simulate spatially-explicit forest C succession (Dymond et al., 2002). An individual-based forest ecosystem carbon budget model (FORCCHN) has been used to investigate forest C distributions in China (Yan and Zhao, 2007). ...
... In order to more thoroughly evaluate our matrix model predictions of forest C stocks, average AGB C and soil organic C were projected using the Forest Carbon Succession v2.0 (ForCsv2) extension for the LANDIS-II model (Dymond et al., 2002) at the second inventory (i.e. remeasured during 2013-2018). ...
Article
Estimates of the spatial-temporal distributions of forest carbon (C) stocks subject to land use and cover changes is critical to greenhouse gas (GHG) estimation and reporting. Based on national forest inventory (NFI) and Landsat time series data, we applied matrix models to estimate and map spatial-temporal distributions of forest aboveground biomass (AGB) C, standing dead C, downed dead C, litter C, and soil organic C from1990-2018 attributed to land cover changes and harvests in the northern United States (US). From predicted pixel-level maps, we found that all five forest C pools of northeast states and northern tier of Great Lake states had higher C density than other regions in the study area. We estimated that forest-related land cover changes reduced the forest C sink by 0.15 ton C ha-1 yr-1 (with a range of 0.12 to 0.18 ton C ha-1 yr-1) a accounting for 29% of forest C reductions over the study period. Forests remaining forests sequestered 2.38 Pg C (2.05 to 2.61 Pg C), hence the net forest sink of the northern US increased 1.73 Pg C (1.52 to 1.93 Pg C) during 1990-2018, which is an annual rate of 0.88 ton C ha-1 yr-1 (0.77 to 0.98 ton C ha-1 yr-1). Moreover, forest C was captured in harvested wood products by 0.33 ton C ha-1 yr-1. An uncertainty analysis with fuzzy sets suggested that the absolute uncertainties of land cover change and harvest impacts on standing dead C, downed dead C, and litter C were lower than 4.50 ton ha-1 during 1990-2018. In comparison, there were high uncertainties associated with estimates of soil organic C and AGB C densities at approximately 12-40 ton ha-1 in northern Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Maine, New Hampshire, and New York. This study demonstrates methods for adhering to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change good practice guidelines for national GHG reporting and presents spatially explicit attribution of regional trends in C fluxes to particular activities and events. The resolved estimates from this analysis can be used to examine local and regional land use and cover change policies and practices in the context of C management in the northern US.
... Following harvest, the time for the carbon to be released to the atmosphere varies depending on the type of harvested roundwood, whether it is sawlog or pulpwood. In general, it can take up to a century for the carbon stored in a sawlog to be completely released to the atmosphere, but only about three years for pulpwood (Smith et al. 2006, Dymond et al. 2012). However, their relative effects on ecosystem carbon sequestration over time remain a major uncertainty (Davis et al. 2009, Nunery and Keeton 2010, McKinley et al. 2011. ...
... Harvested sawlog production serves as an indicator of the longterm carbon sequestration potential of the forest under different management scenarios. Carbon loss in the live biomass was transferred to the harvested sawlog pool, of which a small portion can remain for between 60 and 100 yr (Dymond et al. 2012, Hoover et al. 2014). In the case when there was no fire, the forest served as a net carbon sink. ...
Article
Full-text available
To mitigate and adapt to climate change, forest carbon sequestration and diversity of the ecosystem must be included in forest management planning, while satisfying the demand for wood products. The future provisions of ecosystem services under six realistic management scenarios were assessed to achieve that goal. These services were carbon sequestration, types and quantities of roundwood harvested, and different indicators of forest health—biomass of major species, species diversity, and variation of tree age. A spatially explicit forest succession model was combined with statistical analyses to conduct the assessment at the level of both the whole forest landscape and different ecological zones (ecozones) within. An important aspect of this study was to explore the effects of the biophysical heterogeneity of different ecological zones on the outcomes of different management scenarios. The study area was located in an area of the southern Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina with high tree diversity and active forest management activities. Along with a range of management practices, such richness in diversity allowed us to examine the complexity of the interaction between management activities and species competition. The results showed that fire suppression had a greater effect on increasing biomass carbon sequestration than any management scenario that involves harvest and replanting afterward, but at the expense of other indicators of forest health. The effect of fire on species composition was the largest in the xeric parts of the study area. Based on the study results, it was proposed that a low harvest intensity with a mix of fire and fire suppression across the landscape would best balance the need for roundwood products, biomass carbon sequestration, and desirable species composition. This study also demonstrated that the combination of a spatially explicit forest succession model and statistical analyses could be used to provide a robust and quantifiable projection of ecosystem service provisions and possible trade‐offs under different management scenarios.
... Petrie et al. (2015) studied carbon dynamics in arid ecosystems using statistical regression with field observations, and found a significant increase of carbon sequestration from grassland to shrubland. Moreover, many simulation tools have been developed and available to model carbon dynamics for T different ecosystems, such as CENTURY (Parton et al., 2001), FVS (Forest Vegetation Simulator, Dixon, 2002, CBM-CFS3 (Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sector, Kurz et al., 2009), CO2FIX (Schelhaas et al., 2004) and ForCSv2 (Forest Carbon Succession v2.0) extension for the LANDIS-II model (Dymond et al., 2002). ...
... However, the application of this method is not limited to those types of land use changes in this study. Besides the simulation of the CENTURY model, the other carbon dynamics simulation tools could obtain different carbon dynamics, such as FVS (Dixon, 2002), CBM-CFS3 (Kurz et al., 2009), CO2FIX (Schelhaas et al., 2004) and ForCSv2 extension for the LANDIS-II model (Dymond et al., 2002). Therefore, to determine the most suitable carbon dynamics model for a specific land use change, more validations need to be conducted, albeit the estimation of carbon dynamics is very complex (Adamus et al., 2000). ...
Article
The land use intervention caused a noticeable impact on carbon sequestration as an ecosystem service. To comprehensively project land use change impact on carbon sequestration, the carbon dynamics models in the ecosystem and the atmosphere were integrated, and characterization factors were calculated for different scenarios. In this study, to illustrate the proposed method, the CENTURY model was used to simulate the carbon dynamics for seven land use change scenarios under two climate change scenarios. Carbon dynamics in the atmosphere was simulated by the Bern2.5CC carbon cycle model. The impact on carbon sequestration was calculated based on the difference of carbon sequestration between the land use change scenario and the corresponding baseline and the decay of CO2 in the atmosphere. According to the simulations, we found that carbon storages and differences of the annual carbon sequestration rate were varied among land use change scenarios and between the two climate change scenarios. After land use conversion, an equilibrium status would be obtained after 100 to 200 years of growth. By integrating the carbon dynamics model with the atmosphere, the characterization factors (CF) were calculated for life cycle assessment. The values of CFs were significantly changed in different land use change scenarios, climate change scenarios and time horizons. The comparison to the previous assessment method indicated that the previous method was too conservative. The results suggested that the method in this study could provide a more reasonable assessment of the impact of land use intervention on carbon sequestration.
... To continue this line of research, this study seeks to improve upon prior matrix growth models through explicit incorporation of disturbance and LUC metrics capitalizing on the breadth of Landsat and forest inventory data publicly available in our study area. In addition to matrix modeling, numerous simulation tools are available for validation and extension purposes such as the FVS (Forest Vegetation Simulator, [30]), the ForCSv2 (Forest Carbon Succession v2.0) extension for the LANDIS-II model [31], the CENTURY [32], the CO2FIX [33], and the CBM-CFS3 (Carbon Budget Model of the Canadian Forest Sector [34]). Comparisons of these simulation models with empirically obtained matrix models can help inform the best approaches for quantifying potential forest C dynamics associated with LUC and a range of forest disturbances. ...
Article
Full-text available
Land use change (LUC), disturbances, and their interactions play an important role in regional forest carbon (C) dynamics. Here we quantified how these activities and events may influence future aboveground biomass (AGB) dynamics in forests using national forest inventory (NFI) and Landsat time series data in the Northern United States (US). Total forest AGB predictions were based on simulations of diameter growth, mortality, and recruitment using matrix growth models under varying levels of LUC and disturbance severity (low, medium, and high) every five years from 2018 to 2098. Land use change included the integrated effects of deforestation and reforestation/afforestation (forest [F], → agriculture [A], settlements [urbanization]/other [S], and A&S→F), specifically, conversion from F to A, F to S, F to A&S, A to F, S to F, and A&S to F. Disturbances included natural and anthropogenic disturbances such as wildfire, weather, insects and disease, and forest harvesting. Results revealed that, when simultaneously considering both medium LUC and disturbances, total forest AGB predictions of LUC + fire, LUC + weather, LUC + insect & disease, and LUC + harvest indicated substantial increases in regional C stocks (±Standard Deviation) from 1.88 (±0.13) to 3.29 (±0.28), 3.10 (±0.24), 2.91 (±0.19), and 2.68 (±0.17) Pg C, respectively, from 2018 to 2098. An uncertainty analysis with fuzzy sets suggested that medium LUC + disturbances would lead to greater forest AGB C uptake than undisturbed forest C uptake with high certainty, except for LUC + harvest. The matrix models in this study were parameterized using NFI and Landsat data from the past few decades. Thus our results implied that if recent trends persist, LUC will remain an important driver of forest C uptake while disturbances may result in C emissions compared with undisturbed forest C uptake by 2098. The combined effects of LUC and disturbances may serve as an important driver of C uptake and emissions in the Northern US well into the 21st century.
... LANDIS-II is a stochastic, spatially explicit, raster-based FLSM that simulates species-specific dispersal, establishment, competition, and mortality based on species life history traits, disturbance, and affinities to environmental conditions. LANDIS-II and its parent program, LANDIS (Mladenoff and He 1999), have proven powerful tools for exploring vegetation response to forest management (Gustafson et al. 2010;Shinneman et al. 2010), fire regimes (He and Mladenoff 1999;Sturtevant et al. 2009), biological disturbances (Sturtevant et al. 2012), and climate change (Scheller and Mladenoff 2008;Xu et al. 2009;Dymond et al. 2012). In LANDIS-II, simulated landscapes are represented as a grid of interacting cells, with each cell capable of containing multiple tree or shrub species, representing one to many age cohorts. ...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Climate change is expected to impose significant tension on the geographic distribution of tree species. Yet, tree species range shifts may be delayed by their long life spans, capacity to withstand long periods of physiological stress, and dispersal limitations. Wildfire could theoretically break this biological inertia by killing forest canopies and facilitating species redistribution under changing climate. We investigated the capacity of wildfire to modulate climate-induced tree redistribution across a montane landscape in the central Rocky Mountains under three climate scenarios (contemporary and two warmer future climates) and three wildfire scenarios (representing historical, suppressed, and future fire regimes).
... The 39-year simulation period (2012–2050) was run at a 100 × 100 m grid cell resolution and a 1-year time step. The Forest Carbon Succession v2.0 (ForCSv2) extension for LANDIS-II calculates how cohorts of trees reproduce, age, and die (Dymond et al., 2012). Furthermore, changes in cohort biomass carbon, dead organic matter (DOM), and soil carbon are tracked over time (Fig. 3). ...
Article
Full-text available
Management of temperate forests has the potential to increase carbon sinks and mitigate climate change. However, those opportunities may be confounded by negative climate change impacts. We therefore need a better understanding of climate change alterations to temperate forest carbon dynamics before developing mitigation strategies. The purpose of this project was to investigate the interactions of species composition, fire, management and climate change on the Copper–Pine creek valley, a temperate coniferous forest with a wide range of growing conditions. To do so, we used the LANDIS-II modelling framework including the new Forest Carbon Succession extension to simulate forest ecosystems under four different productivity scenarios, with and without climate change effects, until 2050. Significantly, the new extension allowed us to calculate the Net Sector Productivity, a carbon accounting metric that integrates above and below-ground carbon dynamics, disturbances, and the eventual fate of forest products. The model output was validated against literature values. The results implied that the species optimum growing conditions relative to current and future conditions strongly influenced future carbon dynamics. Warmer growing conditions led to increased carbon sinks and storage in the colder and wetter ecoregions but not necessarily in the others. Climate change impacts varied among species and site conditions and this indicates that both of these components need to be taken into account in when considering climate change mitigation activities and adaptive management. The introduction of a new carbon indicator – Net Sector Productivity, promises to be useful in assessing management effectiveness and mitigation activities.
... While turnover remains a fixed parameter in many models, other models allow root turnover rates to vary as functions of environmental factors such as N mineralization rate in PnET-CN (Aber et al., 1997;Ollinger et al., 2002) or soil water content and temperature in ED2 and ForCENT. In LANDIS-II, FORCS Extension, fine root turnover may temporarily increase to reflect a loss of aboveground biomass due to branch mortality or disturbance (Dymond et al., 2012). These and other similar approaches may enable more complete descriptions of root dynamics into models, though the accuracy of these efforts will depend on the ability to accurately link variation in root turnover rates to changes in environmental factors and ecosystem dynamics. ...
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Predicting the long-term dynamics of forest systems depends on understanding multiple processes that often operate at vastly different scales. Disturbance and seed dispersal are landscape-scale phenomena and are spatially linked across the landscape. Ecosystem processes (e.g., growth and decomposition) have high annual and inter-specific variation and are generally quantified at the scale of a forest stand. To link these widely scaled processes, we used biomass (living and dead) as an integrating variable that provides feedbacks between disturbance and ecosystem processes and feedbacks among multiple disturbances. We integrated a simple model of biomass growth, mortality, and decay into LANDIS, a spatially dynamic landscape simulation model. The new biomass module was statically linked to PnET-II, a generalized ecosystem process model. The combined model simulates disturbances (fire, wind, harvesting), dispersal, forest biomass growth and mortality, and inter- and intra-specific competition. We used the model to quantify how fire and windthrow alter forest succession, living biomass and dead biomass across an artificial landscape representative of northern Wisconsin, USA. In addition, model validation and a sensitivity analysis were conducted.
British Columbia Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations
  • Caren C Dymond -Research
  • Scientist
Caren C. Dymond -Research Scientist, British Columbia Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations. Victoria, BC. Email: Caren.Dymond@gov.bc.ca