Average Vegetation Carbon (gC/m2 ) for the United States and Canada Simulated for Historical data for the years 1961-1990 by the MC1 Model (v7.0)

Average vegetation carbon is calculated for 30 year periods for the historical period and for the future. Percent change is calculated as ((future – historical/historical) x 100). 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.