Ecosystem Process Models
There are many ecosystem process models and each has its strength. The University of Wisconsin helped build some of the most widely used.
The University of Wisconsin assisted in the development of the original forest ecosystem process model Forest BGC, described by Running and Coughlan in 1988 and by Running and Gower in 1991. Forest BGC was later modified to simulate the carbon, water, and nitrogen cycles of all the major biomes of the world, as Running and Hunt described in 1993.
This version of Biome BGC supports multiple interacting vegetation types, improved wetland dynamics, and simulation at scales from a single point up to areas of a million square kilometers. It reliably simulates observed changes in leaf area, net primary production, and carbon stocks for a boreal forest wildfire chronosequence and for natural and harvested cold temperate forests, and it is useful for modeling the dynamics of mixed species stands and ecological succession across large landscapes.
Biome BGC has been used to simulate the effects of disturbance on the carbon and water budgets of forests. The full set of supporting papers is gathered in the model publications list, including the work on multiple interacting vegetation types and the study of fire as the dominant driver of boreal forest carbon balance.
From one canopy to a landscape
The central gain of this line of models is scale. A single canopy model answers a plot level question. A multi vegetation process model answers a landscape level question about mixed stands, succession, and disturbance, which is exactly the scale at which forest and climate policy decisions are made. The evolution of Biome BGC describes how that capability was reached.