Climatization of VDDT - Oregon and Arizona (WWETAC project)

State and transition models are often useful for managers and planners because they integrate natural disturbances (e.g. wildfire, insect outbreaks, and others) with management activities in a relatively user-friendly environment. They allow users to project likely vegetation, disturbance, habitat and other consequences under different management approaches and pinpoint inherent uncertainties. The Vegetation Dynamics Development Tool (VDDT; www.essa.com) provides a state and transition landscape modeling framework to simulate the role of disturbance and management on vegetation cover and structure across landscapes. We are incorporating climate change into VDDT models by connecting them to a dynamic global vegetation model (DGVM). DGVMs project climate change impacts on vegetation and the natural disturbance regime but are often of limited use to land managers because they 1) require high levels of expertise to run, 2) produce broad scale output that may be difficult to relate to smaller areas like National Forests, and 3) generate estimates of ecosystem properties (e.g. carbon pools, net primary productivity) that can be difficult to relate to local resources of interest. We are linking results from a DGVM called MC1 to existing VDDT models. MC1 is a dynamic vegetation model that simulates vegetation distribution, the associated dynamics of their carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles, and their fire regimes. Our project initially focuses on 3 areas: Oregon's Willamette valley, eastern Oregon Cascades, Arizona's Apache Sitgreaves National Forest.