A new version of the CABLE land surface model, incorporating land-use change, woody vegetation demography and a novel optimisation-based approach to plant coordination of photosynthesis

TL;DR

This paper introduces an enhanced version of the CABLE land surface model that incorporates land-use change, woody vegetation dynamics, and a novel optimization approach to plant photosynthesis coordination, improving regional and global carbon cycle simulations.

Contribution

The paper presents new modules for land-use change and woody vegetation, and a novel optimization method for plant photosynthesis coordination based on evolutionary theory.

Findings

Improved simulation of secondary forest biomass and turnover.

Altered estimates of CO2 fertilization effects on photosynthesis.

Enhanced model consistency with the Co-ordination Hypothesis.

Abstract

CABLE is a land surface model (LSM) that can be applied stand-alone, as well as providing for land surface-atmosphere exchange within the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS). We describe critical new developments that extend the applicability of CABLE for regional and global carbon-climate simulations, accounting for vegetation response to biophysical and anthropogenic forcings. A land-use and land-cover change module, driven by gross land-use transitions and wood harvest area was implemented, tailored to the needs of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project-6 (CMIP6). Novel aspects include the treatment of secondary woody vegetation, which benefits from a tight coupling between the land-use module and the Population Orders Physiology (POP) module for woody demography and disturbance-mediated landscape heterogeneity. Land-use transitions and harvest associated with secondary forest tiles modify the annually-resolved patch age distribution within secondary-vegetated tiles, in turn affecting biomass accumulation and turnover rates and hence the magnitude of the secondary forest sink. Additionally, we implemented a novel approach to constrain modelled GPP consistent with the Co-ordination Hypothesis, predicted by evolutionary theory, which suggests that electron transport and Rubisco-limited rates adjust seasonally and across biomes to be co-limiting. We show that the default prior assumption - common to CABLE and other LSMs - of a fixed ratio of electron transport to carboxylation capacity is at odds with this hypothesis, and implement an alternative algorithm for dynamic optimisation of this ratio, such that co-ordination is achieved as an outcome of fitness maximisation. Results have significant implications the magnitude of the simulated CO2 fertilisation effect on photosynthesis in comparison to alternative estimates and observational proxies.