Lund-Potsdam-Jena after the locations of the three research institutes where the model LPJ or LPJ-DGVM was developed. See the Credits.
Not exactly. LPJ-GUESS is a newer version of the General Ecosystem Simulator (GUESS), which includes a version of the Lund-Potsdam-Jena Dynamic Global Vegetation Mode (LPJ or LPJ-DGVM) as a special case. The population mode of LPJ-GUESS corresponds approximately to LPJ-DGVM as described by Sitch et al. (2003) with modifications by Gerten et al. (2004). GUESS (and an early version of LPJ) is described by Smith et al. (2001).
LPJ-GUESS (the model) has been used in a number of published studies (see the Bibliography). The component models LPJ and GUESS are described in published papers (see the previous question). However, the version of LPJ-GUESS incorporated in LPJ-GUESS Education does not correspond exactly to any published model version.
No. LPJ-GUESS Education is intended strictly as a learning aid to help university students and other interested people learn a little about ecosystem modelling and ecosystem responses to global change. The version of LPJ-GUESS (the model) incorporated in LPJ-GUESS Education (the learning aid) is very similar to the research version but does not correspond exactly to any published version of LPJ-GUESS or any of its relatives. If you are interested in using LPJ-GUESS cohort mode in your research, you are welcome to contact the authors to discuss collaboration. If your primary interest is the global model LPJ-DGVM, there is extensive information and a version of the source code available for download at this website.
Yes, by all means.
Absolutely not! The climate time series generated by GetClim are artificial and should only be thought of as a reasonable representation of how the weather might vary through the seasons and from year to year at a particular point on the Earth's surface. Gridded climate data are available from a number of sources, for example here and here.
There could be any number of reasons. One is that what actually grows where you live is probably affected equally much or even more by the activities of human beings than by climate, soils and CO2 concentrations, which are the only environmental factors that the model knows about. Another important reason is that LPJ-GUESS is a very generalised model which is optimised to produce a reasonable overall vegetation map at broad (regional to global) scales based on a minimum number of driving variables. A model optimised for your particular area would probably have to include many more processes and parameters and utilise other driving variables relating, for example, to topography, soil nutrients, disturbance regimes, the local flora and fauna and so on.
Yes, in cohort mode. In population mode all the processes are deterministic.
Yes, in this document. A list of PFT codes is available here.
Yes, in this document.
You are probably using cohort mode and have an older/slower computer. You can speed up the simulations by reducing the number of patches, but that will increase the amount of variation in the results caused by stochastic processes. Population mode runs much faster. More information about these issues is available here.
LPJ-GUESS makes considerable demands on your computer's resources, both the processor and memory. On some older/slower computers, a simulation may virtually monopolise resources, causing other processes and application to temporarily hang up. There is unfortunatly little you can do about this except to upgrade your processor or memory. In some cases, it may help to switch off the graphical output. Click on the Options menu and check the box labelled Suppress all graphics. Results will then no longer appear on the screen, but are still written to the output files.
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