Anthropogenic global change is altering the ways that forests function, but it can be immensely challenging to put hard numbers on the magnitude of those changes. For instance, whilst nobody would dispute that introduced deer and rodents are having immediate effects on New Zealand's native forests (e.g. browse damage is apparent in most forest understories), quite what the long term effects will be remains unclear. The difficulty is that these introduced animals affect only the establishment phase of the life cycle, and it takes many decades, even centuries, for them to have noticeable effects on the forest canopy. Process-based modelling provides a way of quantifying long-term impacts.
We have used process-based models to quantify:
- To explore forest dynamics along a soil chronosequence
- Dynamic modelling of vegetation on a 291,000 year soil chronosequence
- Applications of forest dynamics models for assessing transience in carbon sinks
- The dynamics of aboveground carbon in a New Zealand forest (no page yet)