Landscapes as patches of plant functional types: An integrating concept for climate and ecosystem models

While most land models developed for use with climate models represent vegetation as discrete biomes, this is, at least for mixed life‐form biomes, inconsistent with the leaf‐level and whole‐plant physiological parameterizations needed to couple these biogeophysical models with biogeochemical and ecosystem dynamics models. In this paper, we present simulations with the National Center for Atmospheric Research land surface model (NCAR LSM) that examined the effect of representing vegetation as patches of plant functional types (PFTs) that coexist within a model grid cell. This approach is consistent with ecological theory and models and allows for unified treatment of vegetation in climate and ecosystem models.…