Implementation of an User-Friendly Interface of the Forest- -BGC Model for Regional/Global-Scale Researches

Forest-BGC is a well-known and widely-used general ecophysiological model of forest ecosystem processes for regional applications. It's used to simulate the annual hydrologic balance and the Net Primary Production (NPP) of forests. The net flux of carbon between the atmosphere and terrestrial vegetation can be expressed on an annual basis in terms of NPP. This way, NPP is a key variable for a wide range of ecological studies, mainly for monitoring climate change impact of natural ecosystems. In order to be prepared for climate changes we need some means to predict how different ecosystems will be affected. The only feasible way of making this estimate on a global scale would be the regular coverage of world vegetation by satellite. Forest-BGC was designed to be driven eventually by remote sensing inputs of surface climate and vegetation structure, allowing its use for regional/global-scale ecological researches. One of the most important variables in ForestBGC model is the Leaf Area Index (LAI), an annual quantification of the forest structure relevant for energy and mass exchange. LAI is a key simplification for regional/global-scale applications as it's possible to use LAI maps obtained from remote sensing data providers to estimate NPP maps through the Forest-BGC model. This paper presents a new implementation of the Forest-BGC model that allows feeding it with remote sensing input/output data. The user-friendly interface of this implementation eases the use of Forest-BGC model for regional/global ecological researches. This new implementation has been thoroughly validated against the original Coughlan's SIMLAT 5 implementation, obtaining same results and solving the latter's usability limitations.