FOREST GAP MODELING

Part of ISEM 2004 Quebec City, Sunday August 22nd

Guy R. Larocque, Canadian Forest Service
Louis Archambault, Canadian Forest Service
Pierre Desrochers, Canadian Forest Service

The short course on forest gap modeling will focus on two different models that have been developed to simulate tree and stand growth and forest succession. The first model that will be studied is FVS (Forest Vegetation Simulator). FVS is a single-tree distance-independent growth model that has a long history of development, update, improvement and calibration by several forest growth modelers. It has been used to predict the growth and yield of several forest types in the United States and Canada. This course will focus on the validation effort that was conducted for the main forest types in Ontario, Canada. The second model that will be studied is ZELIG. Relative to a model such as FVS, ZELIG includes general representations of abiotic processes, such as light interception, and simulates the development of different vegetation cohorts that can be found in forest ecosystems. For the course, the calibration efforts that have been conducted for a yellow birch-balsam fir-red spruce forest type in Quebec, Canada, will be discussed. This course will last one full day.

The outline follows:

9:00-  Introduction to forest modeling.
9:30-  Review of the main components of FVS.
10:00- Break.
10:20- Introduction to the software that was developed for FVS in Ontario, CA.
10:45- Review of the results of the validation exercise.
11:15- Practical applications.
12:00- Lunch break.
13:00- Review of the main components of ZELIG.
13:30- Description of the Lake Édouard Experimental Forest in the Mauricie
        National Park (L. Archambault and P. Desrochers).
14:00- Review of the results of the calibration exercise for the red spruce
        forest type at the Lake Édouard experimental site.
15:00- Break
15:20- Practical applications.

Send mail to webmaster@isemna.org with questions or comments about this web site.