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Harvard Forest Symposium Abstract 2016

  • Title: A LANDIS-II extension for incorporating land use and other disturbances
  • Primary Author: Jonathan Thompson (Harvard Forest)
  • Additional Authors: Jonathan Thompson (Harvard Forest)
  • Abstract:

    Forest landscape models (FLMs) are widely used to examine the influence of disturbances on long-term and broad-scale forest ecosystem dynamics. However, FLMs are not well-suited to simulating many types of management or disturbance events, including land-use change. Consequently, there are many situations wherein a researcher may wish to simulate the timing and location of land-use or disturbance events externally, either from a different model, empirical observations, or some other source, and then incorporate these events into an FLM. We present Land Use Plus (hereafter, LU+), an extension for the LANDIS-II FLM that allows users to integrate externally-developed, spatially and temporally explicit representations of land use, land cover change or other disturbance into simulations. LU+ allows users to model the proximate effects of these events on forest composition and biomass, as well as subsequent forest dynamics, including tree establishment and the potential for future management on the altered sites. LU+ will significantly increase the breadth of research questions for which LANDIS-II may be appropriately used.

  • Research Category: Conservation and Management
    Ecological Informatics and Modelling