FOREST GAP MODEL
FORCLIM
FORCLIM is a climate-sensitive forest succession (“gap”) model, developed to simulate forest stand dynamics over a wide range of environmental conditions. The PLANT submodel simulates establishment, growth and mortality of tree individuals that, for technical reasons, are grouped in size cohorts. The WEATHER and WATER submodels provide the input data for the PLANT submodel. The submodel MANAGEMENT allows simulations forest management strategies that are commonly used in Central Europe, such as clearcutting, shelterwood, thinning, planting, among others.
forest dynamics in spatially changing environments (FORSPACE)
FORSPACE is a spatially explicit forest gap model that aims to give a realistic description of the processes that determine forest dynamics at the scale of a landscape (up to thousands of hectares). Gap dynamics in relation to herbivores are an important aspects of FORSPACE. FORSPACE tracks cohorts of identical individuals per species. The vertical structure is represented by different height cohorts per species.
JAnak-BOtkin-WAllis (JABOWA)
JABOWA is a forest model developed in 1970 by Daniel B. Botkin, and James F. Janak and James R. Wallis. Since this, this kind of model is known among ecologists as “gap model” . The model simulates the growth of individual trees on small plots, as a function of forest structure and environmental variables such as elevation, rainfall and soil properties.
LINKAGES
LINKAGES is a forest ecosystem biogeochemistry model that predicts long-term structure and dynamics of forest ecosystems as constrained by nitrogen availability, climate, and soil moisture. LINKAGES simulates ecosystem carbon and nitrogen storage and cycling by considering the interactions between physiological processes that determine individual tree growth, demographic processes that determine tree-population dynamics, microbial processes that determine nitrogen availability, and environmental processes that determine water availability.
SORTIE
SORTIE-ND (or just SORTIE) is an individual-based forest simulator designed to study neighborhood processes. This means that the trees in the forest are modeled individually, not as averages or spatial aggregates. Each individual has a location in space. SORTIE specializes in modeling the interactions of trees with their nearest neighbors to study local neighborhood dynamics.
University of Virginia Forest Model Enhanced (UVAFME)
UVAFME is an individual-based gap model that simulates the annual establishment, growth, and mortality of individual trees on independent patches (i.e. plots) of a forested landscape. The model is only spatially distributed in the vertical dimension, and plots are assumed to have no direct spatial interactions with one another. Through a Monte Carlo-style aggregation, the average of several hundred of these independent patches represents the average expected conditions of a forested landscape through time.
