Evaluation of the individual allocation scheme and its impacts in a dynamic global vegetation model

Abstract

The strategies of plant growth play an important role not only in ecosystem structure, but also in global carbon and water cycles. In this work, the individual carbon allocation scheme of tree PFTs and its impacts were evaluated in China with Institute of Atmospheric Physics-Dynamic Global Vegetation Model, version 1.0 (IAP-DGVM1.0) as a test-bed. The results showed that, as individual growth, the current scheme tended to allocate an increasing proportion of annual net primary productivity (NPP) to sapwood and decreasing proportions to leaf and root accordingly, which led to underestimated individual leaf biomass and overestimated individual stem biomass. Such biases resulted in an overestimation of total ecosystem biomass and recovery time of mature forests, and an underestimation of ecosystem NPP and tree leaf area index in China.