Evaluating the dependence of vegetation on climate in an improved dynamic global vegetation model

The capability of an improved Dynamic Global Vegetation Model (DGVM) in reproducing the impact of climate on the terrestrial ecosystem is evaluated. The new model incorporates the Community Land Model-DGVM (CLM3.0-DGVM) with a submodel for temperate and boreal shrubs, as well as other revisions such as the “two-leaf” scheme for photosynthesis and the definition of fractional coverage of plant functional types (PFTs). Results show that the revised model may correctly reproduce the global distribution of temperate and boreal shrubs, and improves the model performance with more realistic distribution of different vegetation types. The revised model also correctly reproduces the zonal distributions of vegetation types. In reproducing the dependence of the vegetation distribution on climate conditions, the model shows that the dominant regions for trees, grasses, shrubs, and bare soil are clearly separated by a climate index derived from mean annual precipitation and temperature, in good agreement with the CLM4 surface data. The dominant plant functional type mapping to a two dimensional parameter space of mean annual temperature and precipitation also qualitatively agrees with the results from observations and theoretical ecology studies.