EFISCEN-Space model

EFISCEN-Space is an empirical European forest model that simulates development of forest resources under varying scenarios of forest management and climate change. It keeps track of the development of the diameter distribution of 20 tree species (groups) for individual locations (Schelhaas et al., 2022). The diameter distribution changes over time due to the growth of trees (simulated by the growth of trees to a larger diameter class), the removal of trees due to natural (background) mortality or harvest, and the occurrence of new trees (ingrowth) in lowest diameter classes. The EFISCEN-Space model is initialized on tree-wise observations from forest inventories, usually National Forest Inventories (NFIs), and driven by environmental datasets with pan-European coverage (Nabuurs et al., 2007, Schelhaas et al. 2022).These data are used to initialize forest structure and are the basis for the model’s detailed and dynamic (i.e. sensitive to forest structure) simulation of growth (Schelhaas et al. 2018a). Growth is entirely related to the current forest structure (including abiotic predictors), there is no specific thinning effect included. Natural mortality and harvesting can both be based on fixed regimes (based on repeated forest inventories), and on dynamic modules for natural mortality and ingrowth and simulating harvest using harvest rule patterns. Model outputs provide information about forest resources (growing stock volume, increment, harvested volumes, biomass), carbon pools (biomass, litterfall and soil), biodiversity (number of large size trees, species composition, Gini index, deadwood).