Hisashi Sato (FRCGC-JAMSTEC)

SEIB-DGVM is a dynamic global vegetation model, which aims to simulate transient impacts of climatic change on terrestrial ecosystem, and land-atmosphere interactions. It consists of mechanical-based or empirical-based algorithms for physical, physiological, and plant dynamic processes. SEIB-DGVM simulates local area interactions of individual trees within a spatial explicit virtual forest; a sample virtual forest is placed at each grid box, and calculates growth, competition, and decay of each tree by considering light conditions of each tree surrounded by other trees. This representation of plant dynamics has an important advantage over other corresponding models; plant dynamics are adequately represented, and hence response of ecosystem to climatic change would be reasonably predicted.

By showing an example that the model has been adapted to tropical rain forest in Malaysia, I will talk how this advantage is useful for regional applications of forest management to sustain tree species diversity. In this example, environmental changes gave considerable impacts on biodiversity of subdominant species in the lower canopy layers, even if it did not give apparent impacts on dominant canopy species and whole forest structures.