The LANDIS-II Forest Landscape Model

News: LANDIS-II v6.0: Release Candidate 2 Now Available!

LANDIS-II v6 has completed beta-testing - over 12 groups world-wide have put the new version through its paces. Release Candidate 2 (meaning that this release has a high likelihood of becoming the final release) now replaces v5.1 and its extensions. v5.1 and its associated extensions are no longer available and are no longer supported.

LANDIS-II v6 enhancements include: The ability to read and write many more raster file formats; many enhancements that will make extension writing substantially easier for scientists; improved error checking; substantial restructuring to improve the architecture; improved examples and documentation.

As part of this effort, all of our extension code and libraries have moved to Google Code, which offers a robust environment for viewing, downloading, and tracking updates to our code. See the developers page for further information. This research was funded by USFS Northern Research Station in Rhinelander, WI and by Portland State University.

LANDIS-II: Introduction

LANDIS-II simulates forest succession, disturbance (including fire, wind, harvesting, insects), climate change, and seed dispersal across large (typically 10,000 - 20,000,000 ha) landscapes. LANDIS-II tracks the spatial distribution of discrete tree and shrub species and has flexible spatial and temporal resolutions. Learn more about our research and see our publications list.

LANDIS-II advances forest modeling in many respects. Most significantly, LANDIS-II, 1) has flexible time steps for every ecological process, 2) optionally allows for the incorporation of ecosystem processes and states (e.g., live and dead biomass accrual, soil decomposition) 3) uses an advanced architecture that allows rapid model development and easy distribution and installation of model components.

LANDIS-II manages and executes discrete extensions (modules or plug-ins). Each ecological process is programmed as an independent extension that interacts with the landscape through an explicit interface with the core LANDIS-II program. The user specifies which extensions will be used to best simulate the forest dynamics of interest. LANDIS-II allows scientists to easily develop and share their own extensions.

LANDIS-II was developed at the Forest Landscape Ecology Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the USFS Northern Research Station, and the Dynamic Ecosystems and Landscapes Lab at Portland State University.

For further information about LANDIS-II or to report web site problems, contact Dr. Robert Scheller (RMSCHELL @ pdx.edu).

LANDIS-II Web Site Overview

For a broad overview of LANDIS-II, see the LANDIS-II Introduction.

To register as a LANDIS-II user, visit the New User Page.

To download LANDIS-II, see the instructions on the Installation Page. You must be registered and logged in to visit this page.

View the table of available extensions and check for updates at the Extensions Page.

To see or modify the list of active LANDIS-II projects, visit the Projects Page.

To see or modify the list of peer-reviewed papers, visit the Publications Page.

For further User Resources, visit the Users Page.

For Developer Resources, visit the Developers Page.

User Guides for the LANDIS-II core are found in the Documentation Page

User Guides and citations for individual extensions are linked to from the Extensions Page

Join the LANDIS-II Community!

• Registered Members have access to the model installer, extensions, and many additional user resources. To register, please follow the New user? link to the left. After registering, visit the install tab above. Registration is FREE.
• Registered Members also have access to the source code for the base and biomass extensions on the Developers web page. Instructions for developing and compiling extensions, a developers bulletin board, technical documentation are also available. For more information, visit the developers tab after you login.