Forests and Grassland Dynamics

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Image of a secondary tropical forest in Sabah, Malaysia, © Nikolai Knapp.

Forests cover roughly 30% of the earth’s land surface, but land-use and climatic change are modifying and threatening these ecosystems. To protect forests a better understanding of forest dynamics is crucial. Therefore, we have developed a family of process-based forest models: FORMIND and FORMIX. The models are used to simulate the spatio-temporal dynamics of mixed-species forests in combination with disturbances (e.g. logging, drought, storms). Both models calculate tree growth, tree mortality, the carbon balance of individual trees, competition for light, water and space, and recruitment processes by explicit seed dispersal. Our forest models have been applied in

FORMIND Logo
Malaysia, French Guyana, Ecuador, Paraguay, Venezuela, Brasilia, Mexico, Chile, Panama, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Tansania and Germany. New versions for forests of the Amazonian region are in work. We apply complex spatial statistics on observed and simulated tree data in order to get new insights into forest structures and dynamics.

A recently developed forest packing model FPM follows a novel static approach focussing on the structure of forests. Thereby, tree crowns are randomly packed within a forest only competing for space. The simple model has so far been applied to forests in Panama and Sri Lanka. The forest packing model predicts the tree size distribution of forests as well as the spatial heterogenity of local forest structure.

Virtual Forest
Visualization of a crown packing for a tropical forest in Panama. © Thorsten Wiegand /UFZ

Grasslands have been received increasing attention with the rise of several biodiversity experiments. In such experiments, numerous ecosystem functions like productivity, carbon storage often increased as species-richness has been raised, but some experimental sites also shows opposite effects.

GRASSMIND Concept
In order to examine differently emerging relationships between species diversty and ecosystem functions in grasslands, we developed the process-based and individual-oriented grassland model GRASSMIND analogous to our forest model FORMIND. Therein, individual plants compete for light and space aboveground and for soil water and nitrogen belowground. For the latter, we coupled GRASSMIND with the soil model CANDY.

If you are interested in using FORMIND, FORMIX or GRASSMIND, please contact us or visit www.formind.org for download requests.

Selected Publications

  • Taubert, F., Fischer, R., Groeneveld, J., Lehmann, S., Müller, M.S., Rödig, E., Wiegand, T., Huth, A., (2018):
    Global patterns of tropical forest fragmentation
    Nature 554 (7693), 519 - 522
    full text (url)
  • Bohn, F.J., Huth, A., (2017):
    The importance of forest structure to biodiversity–productivity relationships
    R. Soc. Open Sci. 4 , art. 160521
    full text (url)
  • Brinck, K., Fischer, R., Groeneveld, J., Lehmann, S., Dantas de Paula, M., Pütz, S., Sexton, J.O., Song, D., Huth, A., (2017):
    High resolution analysis of tropical forest fragmentation and its impact on the global carbon cycle
    Nat. Commun. 8 , art. 14855
    full text (url)
  • Rödig, E., Cuntz, M., Heinke, J., Rammig, A., Huth, A., (2017):
    Spatial heterogeneity of biomass and forest structure of the Amazon rain forest: Linking remote sensing, forest modelling and field inventory
    Glob. Ecol. Biogeogr. 26 (11), 1292 - 1302
    full text (url)
  • Wiegand, T., May, F., Kazmierczak, M., Huth, A., (2017):
    What drives the spatial distribution and dynamics of local species richness in tropical forest?
    Proc. R. Soc. B-Biol. Sci. 284 (1863), art. 20171503
    full text (url)
  • Fischer, R., Bohn, F., Dantas de Paula, M., Dislich, C., Groeneveld, J., Gutiérrez, A.G., Kazmierczak, M., Knapp, N., Lehmann, S., Paulick, S., Pütz, S., Rödig, E., Taubert, F., Köhler, P., Huth, A., (2016):
    Lessons learned from applying a forest gap model to understand ecosystem and carbon dynamics of complex tropical forests
    Ecol. Model. 326 , 124 - 133
    full text (url)
  • Kazmierczak, M., Backmann, P., Fedriani, J.M., Fischer, R., Hartmann, A.K., Huth, A., May, F., Müller, M.S., Taubert, F., Grimm, V., Groeneveld, J., (2016):
    Monodominance in tropical forests: modelling reveals emerging clusters and phase transitions
    J. R. Soc. Interface 13 (117), art. 0123
    full text (url)
  • Lehmann, S., Huth, A., (2015):
    Fast calibration of a dynamic vegetation model with minimum observation data
    Ecol. Model. 301 , 98 - 105
    full text (url)
  • Taubert, F., Jahn, M.W., Dobner, H.-J., Wiegand, T., Huth, A., (2015):
    The structure of tropical forests and sphere packings
    Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 112 (49), 15125 - 15129
    full text (url)

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