MC1 is a dynamic vegetation model for estimating the distribution of
vegetation and associated ecosystem fluxes of carbon, nutrients, and
water. It was created to assess the potential impacts of global climate
change on ecosystem structure and function at a wide range of spatial
scales from landscape to global. The model incorporates transient
dynamics to make predictions about the patterns of ecological change.
MC1 was created by combining physiologically based biogeographic rules
defined in the MAPSS model with a modified version of the biogeochemical
model, CENTURY. MC1 includes a fire module, MCFIRE, that mechanistically
simulates the occurrence and impacts of fire events. Climate input data
sources for this particular run include the Climatic Research Unit (CRU
TS 2.0), the Canadian Forest Service, and Parameter-elevation
Regressions on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM). CRU data was used to
provide the variability (based on anomalies) and CFS and PRISM were used
to provide the mean climate for 1961-1990. Alaska and conterminous USA
soil was gridded from STATSGO and NATSGO data by Jeff Kern. Canadian
soil came from the North American Generalized Soil Data Set (NAGSOIL),
Version 0.2.