Modeling vegetation and carbon dynamics of managed grasslands at the global scale with LPJmL 3.6

Rolinski, Susanne; Müller, Christoph; Heinke, Jens; Weindl, Isabelle; Biewald, Anne; Bodirsky, Benjamin Leon; Bondeau, Alberte; Boons-Prins, Eltje R.; Bouwman, Alexander F.; Leffelaar, Peter A.; te Roller, Johnny A.; Schaphoff, Sibyll; Thonicke, Kirsten

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-429-2018

Articles | Volume 11, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-429-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Special issue:

The Lund–Potsdam–Jena managed Land (LPJmL) dynamic...

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-429-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 11, issue 1

Model description paper

|

01 Feb 2018

Model description paper |

| 01 Feb 2018

Modeling vegetation and carbon dynamics of managed grasslands at the global scale with LPJmL 3.6

Susanne Rolinski, Christoph Müller, Jens Heinke, Isabelle Weindl, Anne Biewald, Benjamin Leon Bodirsky, Alberte Bondeau, Eltje R. Boons-Prins, Alexander F. Bouwman, Peter A. Leffelaar, Johnny A. te Roller, Sibyll Schaphoff, and Kirsten Thonicke

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Final revised paper (published on 01 Feb 2018)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 21 Feb 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of GMD.D 2017-26', Anonymous Referee #1, 02 Mar 2017
- AC1: 'Response to Interactive comment doi:10.5194/gmd-2017-26-RC1, 2017', Susanne Rolinski, 21 Jun 2017
RC2: 'Review of gmd-2017-26', Anonymous Referee #2, 06 Apr 2017
- AC2: 'Response to Interactive comment doi:10.5194/gmd-2017-26-RC2, 2017', Susanne Rolinski, 21 Jun 2017

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Susanne Rolinski on behalf of the Authors (01 Sep 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (05 Sep 2017) by Tomomichi Kato

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (25 Oct 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The manuscript presented the implementation of different management schemes in LPJmL, and assessed the impact of the schemes on productivity and soil carbon storage. In the revised manuscript and responses, the authors addressed the reviewers’ most comments very well. I would recommend to accept it after addressing the following issues:
1) P4L5: from the detailed description in Methods, M is not an ‘intensive’ mowing.
2) P5L9: It might be better to cite original reference for the pasture area.
3) P6L26: LPJmL3.5 is not mentioned before. Either give a reference or a web link.
4) P8L14: small ruminants
5) P8L15: It still be necessary to define or mention where the combination management to be used. For example, rangeland may not be mown in most regions.
6) P8L24-26: the description here is not the same as in Sec. 1.2.
7) P9L3: Vegetated period could be much shorter than 1 year, which makes harvest may be failed in non-growing season? I am not convinced that option M is a good/typical management schemes. But it might be useful to represent in the future a combination of mowing+grazing.
8) P10L16: Is there a fixed fraction in the model for the carbon to animal and mineralized?
9) P11L14: Why use 390-year spinup?
10) P11L27: why use 1998-2002 rather than usually used long-term mean? Please specify the reason.
11) P12L9: harvest here is a little confusing. May think about change a word. biomass use potential?
12) P13L23: Here savanna is used. Does it fit the classification of Koppen classification? As mentioned by Reviewer 1, I cannot find the rationales behind this climate classification. It is not as mentioned in the response can help explain ‘motivated by the values in the climate response figures’, because the difference response to management did not well locate in the bioclimatic regions defined here.
13) P13L27: It is a little hard to believe 72% of NPP is harvested (include belowground NPP?) given the curve in Fig. 1.
14) P15L5: If the exponentially grow is due to lr, it would be necessary to explain other factors that should affect the regrowth such as nutrient limitation.
15) P16L2: It seems not ‘below’ 500 in Fig 5.
16) P16L11: 3.5 is not slightly higher in mean.
17) P16L16: in previous similar presentation, 100 gC was used. Might be better to stick to it.
18) P19L4-5: It may be necessary to explain this ratio under the context of turnover time of soil, since mowing/grazing only affect biomass input into the soil.
19) P20L20-21: this sentence is hard to understand.
20) P25L4: ‘animals are not only fed with grass’ It is the situation for many regions of the world. Is it?
21) P25L11: And might be more importantly depending on the carbon-nutrient interactions.
22) P25L27: and may also no external fertilization.
23) P3L24: you mentioned in Sec. 4.2 that Chang et al., 2016 has applied a model at global scale.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #4 (22 Nov 2017)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (22 Nov 2017) by Tomomichi Kato

AR by Susanne Rolinski on behalf of the Authors (08 Dec 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (11 Dec 2017) by Tomomichi Kato

AR by Susanne Rolinski on behalf of the Authors (18 Dec 2017) Manuscript

Short summary

One-third of the global land area is covered with grasslands which are grazed by or mowed for livestock feed. These areas contribute significantly to the carbon capture from the atmosphere when managed sensibly. To assess the effect of this management, we included different options of grazing and mowing into the global model LPJmL 3.6. We found in polar regions even low grazing pressure leads to soil carbon loss whereas in temperate regions up to 1.4 livestock units per hectare can be sustained.