Understanding Disturbance Regimes From Patterns in Modeled Forest Biomass

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Siyuan Wang - , Junior Professorship in Environmental Remote Sensing, Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (Author)
  • Hui Yang - , Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (Author)
  • Sujan Koirala - , Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (Author)
  • Matthias Forkel - , Junior Professorship in Environmental Remote Sensing (Author)
  • Markus Reichstein - , Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Michael Stifel Center Jena for Data-driven and Simulation Science (Author)
  • Nuno Carvalhais - , Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Michael Stifel Center Jena for Data-driven and Simulation Science, NOVA University Lisbon (Author)

Abstract

Natural and anthropogenic disturbances are important drivers of tree mortality, shaping the structure, composition, and biomass distribution of forest ecosystems. Differences in disturbance regimes, characterized by the frequency, extent, and intensity of disturbance events, result in structurally different landscapes. In this study, we design a model-based experiment to investigate the links between disturbance regimes and spatial biomass patterns. First, the effects of disturbance events on biomass patterns are simulated using a simple dynamic carbon cycle model based on different disturbance regime attributes, which are characterized via three parameters: μ (probability scale), α (clustering degree), and β (intensity slope). 856,800 dynamically stable biomass patterns were then simulated using combined disturbance regime, primary productivity, and background mortality. As independent variables, we use biomass synthesis statistics from simulated biomass patterns to retrieve three disturbance regime parameters. Results show confident inversion of all three “true” disturbance parameters, with Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency of 94.8% for μ, 94.9% for α, and 97.1% for β. Biomass histogram statistics primarily dominate the prediction of μ and β, while texture features have a more substantial influence on α. Overall, these results demonstrate the association between biomass patterns and disturbance regimes. Given the increasing availability of Earth observation of biomass, our findings open a new avenue to understand better and parameterize disturbance regimes and their links with vegetation dynamics under climate change. Ultimately, at a large scale, this approach would improve our current understanding of controls and feedback at the biosphere-atmosphere interface in the present Earth system models.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere2023MS004099
JournalJournal of advances in modeling earth systems
Volume16
Issue number6
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0003-0363-9697/work/168206881

Keywords

Keywords

  • biomass, carbon cycle dynamics, disturbance regime, forest mortality, gap dynamics