New paper: Demography, dynamics and data: building confidence for simulating changes in the world’s forests
Vegetation Demographic Models (VDMs) are key tools for simulating how forests respond to climate and land-use changes, shaping carbon cycle projections and large-scale management strategies. Yet, these models differ in their assumptions, and until now, no quantitative comparison existed.
Team of researchers, partly supported by INFORMA, benchmarked nine VDMs against real-world data from boreal, temperate, and tropical forests, testing their ability to predict tree growth, carbon turnover, biomass, and size distribution under consistent climate conditions over 420 years of post-disturbance recovery.
Results show that while models generally capture mature forest carbon stocks, they vary widely in early regrowth rates and often balance overestimated growth with underestimated mortality. This first multi-model comparison identifies growth and mortality as critical calibration targets and calls for refining post-disturbance establishment conditions.
The study provides a roadmap for improving predictions of forest responses to environmental change, essential for climate modeling and sustainable forest management.
Interested to learn more – read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.70643
Eckes-Shephard, A.H., Argles, A.P.K., Brzeziecki, B., Cox, P.M., De Kauwe, M.G., Esquivel-Muelbert, A., Fisher, R.A., Hurtt, G.C., Knauer, J., Koven, C.D., Lehtonen, A., Luyssaert, S., Marqués, L., Ma, L., Marie, G., Moore, J.R., Needham, J.F., Olin, S., Peltoniemi, M., Piltz, K., Sato, H., Sitch, S., Stocker, B.D., Weng, E., Zuleta, D. and Pugh, T.A.M. (2025), Demography, dynamics and data: building confidence for simulating changes in the world’s forests. New Phytol, 248: 2722-2749. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.70643