Understanding Disturbance Regimes From Patterns in Modeled Forest Biomass
Research output: Contribution to journal › Research article › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
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 language | English |
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Article number | e2023MS004099 |
Journal | Journal of advances in modeling earth systems |
Volume | 16 |
Issue number | 6 |
Publication status | Published - Jun 2024 |
Peer-reviewed | Yes |
External IDs
ORCID | /0000-0003-0363-9697/work/168206881 |
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Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Keywords
- biomass, carbon cycle dynamics, disturbance regime, forest mortality, gap dynamics