| Has description
|
EFISCEN-Space is under development since 2006, as a successor of the EFISCEN model. It is a diameter-class model, operating at the stand level with growth driven by environmental datasets with pan-European coverage. This set-up allows handling a wide variety of stand types (also mixed and uneven-aged) and management options, at the level of individual NFI plots, located anywhere in Europe. The state of each plot for every simulation step of one year is expressed as a distribution of number of trees over diameter classes, per species or species group (currently 20 species groups). At the plot level EFISCEN-Space distinguishes the ecological processes of tree growth, tree mortality, tree ingrowth and soil biomass decomposition, and management processes such as tree harvesting and tree planting. The known location (plot coordinates) allows coupling of the modelled processes to exogenous location descriptors in terms of soil, weather and climate. In the future, interactions with processes operating at the landscape level and/or country level will be added, but these are not part of the current version of EFISCEN-Space. EFISCEN-Space is modular, such that depending on the aim of the application and resources available, modules can operate on different levels of detail, or can be excluded if not relevant. Currently the model is applied to 15 countries in Europe that have made their detailed NFI data available for this modelling effort.
The development of EFISCEN-Space model profited from numerous national and international projects including several Framework Programmes from the European Commission as well as the Horizon 2020 grant from Netherlands' Ministry of Research.
Additional funding and co-funding of the EU-projects was received from various projects under the Knowledge Base programmes of the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Security.
|
