Reforestation / planting in FATES

[JessicaNeedham]

I added planting in FATES which is needed for some site scale simulations I’m running as part of a land management project. New code here. Starting a discussion to see if this is something that might be useful to other FATES users or if it is niche enough to stay on my branch. Right now it is rather basic but works for the single site simulations I’m doing. There is a namelist switch for turning reforestation on or off and three parameters: planting density (no. plants per m2), planting height (size of new plants) and a reforestation event code that determines the frequency of planting (duplicate of the logging event code). Some sanity checks (below) suggest it is working as intended but I still need to do more thorough testing.

If this was going to be used in large scale simulations we’d probably want to integrate it with the land use code. Possibly planting parameters could be their own gridded file but I don’t know how much data is available to support that.

Discussed a little with @rgknox @rosiealice and @adrifoster today and the idea was floated that we could have a suite of land management related tools that could be packaged together.