Modeling Carbon and Water Budgets in the Lushi Basin with Biome-BGC

1 INTRODUCTIONEvapotranspiration (ET) is the key process controlling theexchange of energy and hydrologic flux for vegetatedsurface. Terrestrial net primary productivity (NPP)represents the carbon available for plant allocation toleaves, stems, roots, defensive compounds, reproductionand is the basic measure of biological productivity. Treegrowth, forage available for grazing, food productivity,and atmospheric CO2 levels are all strongly controlled byNPP (White et al., 2000). The exch…

Modeling Carbon and Water Budgets in the Lushi Basin with Biome-BGC

In this article, annual evapotranspiration(ET) and net primary productivity (NPP) of fourtypes of vegetation were estimated for the Lushi basin,a subbasin of the Yellow River in China. These fourvegetation types include: deciduous broadleaf forest,evergreen needle leaf forest, dwarf shrub and grass.Biome-BGC--a biogeochemical process model wasused to calculate annual ET and NPP for eachvegetation type in the study area from 1954 to 2000.Daily microclimate data of 47 years monitored byLushi meteorological station was extrapolated tocover the basin using MT-CLIM, a mountainmicroclimate simulator. The output files of MT-CLIM were used to feed Biome-BGC. We usedaverage ecophysiological values of each type ofvegetation supplied by Numerical TerradynamicSimulation Group (NTSG) in the University ofMontana as input ecophysiological constants file.The estimates of daily NPP in early July and annualET on these four biome groups were comparedrespectively with field measurements and other studies.Daily gross primary production (GPP) of evergreenneedle leaf forest measurements were very close tothe output of Biome-BGC, but measurements ofbroadleaf forest and dwarf shrub were much smallerthan the simulation result. Simulated annual ET andNPP had a significant correlation with precipitation,indicating precipitation is the major environmentalfactor affecting ET and NPP in the study area.Precipitation also is the key climatic factor for theinterannual ET and NPP variations.