A LANDIS-II extension for incorporating land use and other disturbances

Forest landscape models (FLMs) are widely used to examine the influence of disturbances on long-term and broad-scale forest ecosystem dynamics. However, FLMs are not well-suited to simulating some types of management or disturbance regimes, including land-use change. Consequently, there are situations in which a researcher may wish to estimate the timing and location of events externally, either from a different model, empirical observations, or some other source, and then incorporate them into an FLM. We present Land Use Plus (LUþ), an extension for the LANDIS-II FLM that allows users to integrate externally-developed, spatially and temporally explicit representations of land use or other disturbance into simulations. LUþ allows users to model the proximate effects of these events on forest composition and biomass, as well as subsequent dynamics, including tree establishment and the potential for future management. LUþ will significantly increase the breadth of research questions for which LANDIS-II may be appropriately used. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.