Representation of fire, land-use change and vegetation dynamics in the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator vn4.9 (JULES)

Burton, Chantelle; Betts, Richard; Cardoso, Manoel; Feldpausch, Ted R.; Harper, Anna; Jones, Chris D.; Kelley, Douglas I.; Robertson, Eddy; Wiltshire, Andy

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-179-2019

Articles | Volume 12, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-179-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) – configurations,...

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-12-179-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 1

Development and technical paper

|

09 Jan 2019

Development and technical paper |

| 09 Jan 2019

Representation of fire, land-use change and vegetation dynamics in the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator vn4.9 (JULES)

Chantelle Burton, Richard Betts, Manoel Cardoso, Ted R. Feldpausch, Anna Harper, Chris D. Jones, Douglas I. Kelley, Eddy Robertson, and Andy Wiltshire

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Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Review comments', Anonymous Referee #1, 20 Sep 2018
- AC1: 'Response to Reviewer 1', Chantelle Burton, 19 Oct 2018
RC2: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #2, 10 Oct 2018
- AC2: 'Response to Reviewer 2', Chantelle Burton, 19 Oct 2018

Peer-review completion

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

AR by Chantelle Burton on behalf of the Authors (12 Nov 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (14 Nov 2018) by Christoph Müller

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (26 Nov 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The manuscript documents the coupling between land use, fire and vegetation dynamics and nicely shows the improvements in modelled vegetation when land use and fire are included in the model. This is an important step in model development and certainly deserves publication in GMD to document this development step and the model improvements.
I have a couple of questions and some suggestions for clarification and additional references that could be included.
Page and line numbers refer to the document with tracked changes.

p.9, l. 31: I am not sure what you mean with over-disturbance.
p. 10, l. 1: how do land-use and fire interact?
p.10, l. 12: the new disturbance term is based on the INFERNO model developed by mangeon et al? Please refer to the previous development here.
p.11 l. 30: Andela et al. show that the fire occurrence has been reduced, however there is no strong support of fragemented fuel loads in the study. Bistinas et al (2014) also show a reduction of burned area with increases in croplands.
p.12 l. 1: see Veraverbeke et al. (2017) for the influence of lightning in boreal regions
p.12 l. 4: delete "these"
p.12 l. 5: some references to previous developments in other models could be informative. See for instance Reick et al. (2013)
p. 13 l. 27: Whether a PFT is dominant or not is described in the previous paragraph? Then this is not the new development? only the definition of cij for the land use is new? I would explain the cij in the previous paragraph and here only describe the adjustment for land use. It is a bit unclear to me what is the new development. Clark et al. (2011) describe a similar procedure not allowing woody PFTs to establish on agricultural lands.
p. 15, table 2: how did you choose the parameter values?
p.18, l. 12: if the LULCC only simulation includes fires in the global disturbance term I would name it "LULCC and constant fire" instead.
p. 18 l.26: you use the manhatten metric for the MODIS VCF? the VCF gives the percentage, so you can simply use the NME.
p.26, l. 15: how do you turn burned area into tree mortality, probably tree mortality is too high? But I actually do not see a strong overestimation of grasses in Congo or Cerrado. Please refer to a figure. also in the previous paragraph, please refer to a figure or table.
p.30, l. 5: you could also compare to Bond et al. 2005
p.30, l. 20: the point that reductions in burned area are found with increases in cropland may explain this, see references and paragraph in the introduction.
p.31 l.3: adaptation to fire and resprouting might be plausible explanations too.
I see the last two comments are already adressed in the manuscript, you could probably rephrase the paragraph to indicate earlier that you are offering possibilities to solve the "over-disturbance".
p.31. l.4-5: there is also considerable underestimation of the burned area maxima in the model.
p.31, l.8-9: see Pfeiffer et al. 2013 for inclusion of cropland fragmentation in a fire model.

References:
Bistinas, I., Harrison, S. P., Prentice, I. C. and Pereira, J. M. C.: Causal relationships versus emergent patterns in the global controls of fire frequency, Biogeosciences, 11, 5087–5101, doi:10.5194/bg-11-5087-2014, 2014.
Bond, W. J., Woodward, F. I. and Midgley, G. F.: The global distribution of ecosystems in a world without fire., New Phytol., 165(2), 525–537, doi:10.1111/j.1469-8137.2004.01252.x, 2005.
Clark, D. B., Mercado, L. M., Sitch, S., Jones, C. D., Gedney, N., Best, M. J., Pryor, M., Rooney, G. G., Essery, R. L. H., Blyth, E., Boucher, O., Harding, R. J., Huntingford, C. and Cox, P. M.: The Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES), model description – Part 2: Carbon fluxes and vegetation dynamics, Geosci. Model Dev., 4(3), 701–722, doi:10.5194/gmd-4-701-2011, 2011.
Pfeiffer, M., Spessa, A. and Kaplan, J. O.: A model for global biomass burning in preindustrial time: LPJ-LMfire (v1.0), Geosci. Model Dev., 6(3), 643–685, doi:10.5194/gmd-6-643-2013, 2013.
Reick, C. H., Raddatz, T., Brovkin, V. and Gayler, V.: Representation of natural and anthropogenic land cover change in MPI-ESM, J. Adv. Model. Earth Syst., 5(3), 459–482, doi:10.1002/jame.20022, 2013.
Veraverbeke, S., Rogers, B. M., Goulden, M. L., Jandt, R. R., Miller, C. E., Wiggins, E. B. and Randerson, J. T.: Lightning as a major driver of recent large fire years in North American boreal forests, Nat. Clim. Chang., 7(7), 529–534, doi:10.1038/nclimate3329, 2017.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #4 (27 Nov 2018)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

General Comment:
This study touches on the issue of representation fire disturbance in the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES). New model features including a better description on updating the natural mortality due to the fire activity/burnt area simulated by INFERNO (Mangeon et al, 2016) for five selected PFTs (plant function types: broadleaf tree needle leaved tree, shrub, C3&C4 grass) and formulations of the carbon emission due to fires from two selected soil carbon pools (decomposable and resistant plant material soil carbon pools) are presented in the manuscript. In the revised manuscript, the authors have been already addressed most of the comments from previous two reviewers.
The behavior of enhanced model was tested with and without imposed the global LULCC (S2&S3), and incorporating the new feature (S2F & S3F). The authors concluded that the new implementation can improve the model representation of the global vegetation cover after considering the global LULCC and fire disturbance simulated by INFERNO, however the new implementation shows the deficit on the tree coverage over the boreal regions. I think this new development is quite important for the applications of the UK ESM, especially for understanding the impact of biomass burning in the future.
Due to the scope of manuscript type is model development for the publication in GMD, I have a few suggestions for the authors to revise their manuscript. In the third section, I suggest to rename the title “Method” to “Experimental set-up and model evaluation”, and also to provide a more detail description on the forcing to the developed model, for example: the potential forest/agriculture land cover fraction in HYDE 3.2 from 19XX to 2015 was forced and updated annually to the land for the S3/SF3 simulations, and what is expected to be observed from comparing the result between two simulations. Within this section, I also spotted a few minor issues which were unclear to me, please see the specific comment for the detail. In the result section, the authors only chosen the result for the present day (2014) to evaluate the model performance; however it would be nice to show the mean state from long-term period to avid the model bias in warm year or cold year. Another approach is by adding additional information to the Fig. 4, which shows the transient evolution of the model prediction, upper limited and lower limited from the observation.
Finally, I recommend the authors to restructure the discussion session into several sub-sessions, i.e. current model limitation, modelling the disturbance (including the anthropogenic disturbance and natural disturbance), modelling improvement in the future, and others. For example, the model currently only can simulated a realistic fire activity with a reliable LULCC reconstruction/observation. For the representation of fires, does the model capture the fire activity in the peatland and its emission over the peatland? Fires over those region can produce heavy air pollution and transport pollutants from tropics to temperate climate zone. Does the model reasonable simulate the demography after the fire disturbance? Does the model explicitly couple the other natural disturbance agents, such as windthrow or pest outbreak, through a large scale LULCC forcing after this new development? I listed several references which are relevant for the discussion.

References:
Yue, C., et al.: Representing anthropogenic gross land use change, wood harvest, and forest age dynamics in a global vegetation model ORCHIDEE-MICT v8.4.2, Geosci. Model Dev., 11, 409-428, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-409-2018, 2018.
Haverd, V., et al.: A new version of the CABLE land surface model (Subversion revision r4601) incorporating land use and land cover change, woody vegetation demography, and a novel optimisation-based approach to plant coordination of photosynthesis, Geosci. Model Dev., 11, 2995-3026, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-2995-2018, 2018.
Marra, D. M., et al: Windthrow control biomass patterns and functional composition of Amazon forests, Global Change Biology, doi:10.1111/gcb.14457.
Chen, Y.-Y., et al.: Simulating damage for wind storms in the land surface model ORCHIDEE-CAN (revision 4262), Geosci. Model Dev., 11, 771-791, https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-771-2018, 2018.
Landry, J.-S, et al.: Modelling long-term impacts of mountain pine beetle outbreaks on merchantable biomass, ecosystem carbon, albedo, and radiative forcing. Biogeosciences 13, 5277-5295, 2016.

Specific Comment:
1. Please provide a table which summaries parameters that were tuned in this study. For example, in the P30L15, I can’t find the information of the spreading parameter (lambda) in the Table 1.
2. Please explain the value of theta (soil moisture) that applies for the equation (4). Does this value represent a vertical average of soil layer or using the soil depth associate with the soil carbon pools for the decomposable and resistant plant material?
3. Can you explain why most of your simulation result from the SF3 shows a relative low tree coverage which comparing with the ESA observation, when you apply a smaller background mortality (half of the original values) for tree species in the new development?
4. Please add an extra column in Table 3, which indicates the variable was updated from LULCC map or INFERNO fire module.

Technical Comment:
1. In the Fig. 5, please replace “S2, fire” to “SF2, fire” and “S3, fire” to “SF3, fire” in the figure legend for the consistence
2. Please use “burnt area” to replace “burned area” throughout the manuscript both for plots and texts throughout the manuscript.
3. Please use “windthrow” to replace “windfall”
4. When doing a final check of the references cite in this manuscript, I can’t find the citation of Avitabile et al. 2016: An integrated pan-tropical… in the text. In the P17L4, “Klein Goldewijk et al., 2011” should be “Klein Goldewijk et al., 2013”.

Referee Report: PDF

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (27 Nov 2018) by Christoph Müller

AR by Chantelle Burton on behalf of the Authors (07 Dec 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (10 Dec 2018) by Christoph Müller

AR by Chantelle Burton on behalf of the Authors (10 Dec 2018) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

Fire and land-use change are important disturbances within the Earth system, and their inclusion in models is critical to enable the correct simulation of vegetation cover. Here we describe developments to the land surface model JULES to represent explicit land-use change and fire and to assess the effects of each process on present day vegetation compared to observations. Using historical land-use data and the fire model INFERNO, overall model results are improved by the developments.