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    Description and evaluation of the process-based forest model 4C v2.2 at four European forest sites
    (Katlenburg-Lindau : Copernicus, 2020) Lasch-Born, Petra; Suckow, Felicitas; Reyer, Christopher P. O.; Gutsch, Martin; Kollas, Chris; Badeck, Franz-Werner; Bugmann, Harald K. M.; Grote, Rüdiger; Fürstenau, Cornelia; Lindner, Marcus; Schaber, Jörg
    The process-based model 4C (FORESEE) has been developed over the past 20 years to study climate impacts on forests and is now freely available as an open-source tool. The objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive description of this 4C version (v2.2) for scientific users of the model and to present an evaluation of 4C at four different forest sites across Europe. The evaluation focuses on forest growth as well as carbon (net ecosystem exchange, gross primary production), water (actual evapotranspiration, soil water content), and heat fluxes (soil temperature) using data from the PROFOUND database. We applied different evaluation metrics and compared the daily, monthly, and annual variability of observed and simulated values. The ability to reproduce forest growth (stem diameter and biomass) differs from site to site and is best for a pine stand in Germany (Peitz, model efficiency ME=0.98). 4C is able to reproduce soil temperature at different depths in Sorø and Hyytiälä with good accuracy (for all soil depths ME > 0.8). The dynamics in simulating carbon and water fluxes are well captured on daily and monthly timescales (0.51 < ME < 0.983) but less so on an annual timescale (ME < 0). This model–data mismatch is possibly due to the accumulation of errors because of processes that are missing or represented in a very general way in 4C but not with enough specific detail to cover strong, site-specific dependencies such as ground vegetation growth. These processes need to be further elaborated to improve the projections of climate change on forests. We conclude that, despite shortcomings, 4C is widely applicable, reliable, and therefore ready to be released to the scientific community to use and further develop the model.
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    Estimating global land system impacts of timber plantations using MAgPIE 4.3.5
    (Katlenburg-Lindau : Copernicus, 2021) Mishra, Abhijeet; Humpenoeder, Florian; Dietrich, Jan Philipp; Bodirsky, Benjamin Leon; Sohngen, Brent; Reyer, Christopher P. O.; Lotze-Campen, Hermann; Popp, Alexander
    Out of 1150 Mha (million hectares) of forest designated primarily for production purposes in 2020, plantations accounted for 11 % (131 Mha) of this area and fulfilled more than 33 % of the global industrial roundwood demand. However, adding additional timber plantations to meet increasing timber demand intensifies competition for scarce land resources between different land uses such as food, feed, livestock and timber production. Despite the significance of plantations with respect to roundwood production, their importance in meeting the long-term timber demand and the implications of plantation expansion for overall land-use dynamics have not been studied in detail, in particular regarding the competition for land between agriculture and forestry in existing land-use models. This paper describes the extension of the modular, open-source land system Model of Agricultural Production and its Impact on the Environment (MAgPIE) using a detailed representation of forest land, timber production and timber demand dynamics. These extensions allow for a better understanding of the land-use dynamics (including competition for land) and the associated land-use change emissions of timber production. We show that the spatial cropland patterns differ when timber production is accounted for, indicating that timber plantations compete with cropland for the same scarce land resources. When plantations are established on cropland, it causes cropland expansion and deforestation elsewhere. Using the exogenous extrapolation of historical roundwood production from plantations, future timber demand and plantation rotation lengths, we model the future spatial expansion of forest plantations. As a result of increasing timber demand, we show a 177 % increase in plantation area by the end of the century (+171 Mha in 1995–2100). We also observe (in our model results) that the increasing demand for timber amplifies the scarcity of land, which is indicated by shifting agricultural land-use patterns and increasing yields from cropland compared with a case without forestry. Through the inclusion of new forest plantation and natural forest dynamics, our estimates of land-related CO2 emissions better match with observed data, in particular the gross land-use change emissions and carbon uptake (via regrowth), reflecting higher deforestation with the expansion of managed land and timber production as well as higher regrowth in natural forests and plantations.