SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL SCALES

The temporal scales of LANDIS are largely dictated by the current 10-year age-cohort structure, and the 10-year time step makes the model suitable for simulating long-term dynamics (10¹-10³ years). The spatial scales of LANDIS are within 10³ - 10⁷ ha, depending on the simulation cell size. Since LANDIS tracks only the presence/absence of species age cohorts, not individual trees, computational loads are greatly reduced. In addition, the essential information of presence/absence is relatively independent of cell size, and therefore LANDIS is capable of simulating forest succession at cell sizes ranging from 10 to 500 m (He et al. 1999a).

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