Perspectives for improving carbon and nitrogen allocation in forest models from stand to global scale

Abstract

We show that using a fixed foliage: fine-root ratio leads to unrealistic modeled responses of forest growth to environmental variability (in particular to soil nitrogen availability). Not only the relative growth of organs (carbon allocation) will be off but also gross primary productivity predictions indirectly suffer from a lack of allocation flexibility. We suggest that applying evolution-based optimization principles to account for allocation plasticity is a key measure to improving future forest models and dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs).