What About Climate Change?

Climate change is currently handled by individual extensions. To date (December 2007) the Biomass Succession extensions (v1 and v2), the Base Fire extension, and the new Dynamic Fire and Fuels System can simulate the effects of a changing climate.

The Biomass Succession extension allow the user to update all of the extension input parameters at the time step that the user chooses. Therefore, growth rates, decay rates, and the probability of establishment could all change as climate changes.

The Base Fire extension allows temporally dynamic fire regions such that the location of fire regions changes over time. If the parameters for a fire region reflect climate change, that fire region(s) could be added (replacing the previous fire region entirely or in part) at a later time step. The Dynamic Fire extension allows both the weather and the fire regions to change over time.

The Century Succession extension simulates changes in soil carbon and nitrogen as climate changes. The Century succession extension requires monthly weather inputs updated at regular intervals in order to simulate climate change effects.