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| | 210 | When stands grow old the tree density decreases and under certain conditions the LAI can no longer cover the ground area. When this happens productivity will start to decrease. In nature the decrease in LAI comes with an increase in the amount of light reaching the forest floor which enables seedlings to grow and to restore the LAI. This process is known as recruitment. Note that in managed forest and forest with a lot of stand replacing disturbances (for example, fire) the forest may never reach the stage where the canopy sufficiently opens up to enable recruitment. |
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| | 212 | ORCHIDEE-CN-CAN can simulate recruitment for each PFT separatly by setting '''recruitment_pft_xx''' to true or false. When using age classes it makes sense to have the same setting for all age classes of the same species. When developing and testing the code it was considered too time consuming to change the settings at the PFT level so a flag ignoring the setting for recruitment_pft_xx was introduced. If the '''recruitment''' flag is set to true, the settings of recruitment_pft_xx will be used. If the '''recruitment''' flag is set to false, the settings of recruitment_pft_xx will be ignored and the model runs without recruitment. |
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| | 214 | Recruitment has been developed, tested and validated for tropical forests. There is no reason why it shouldn''t work for other forests but that needs to be confirmed. At present recruitment was introduced at the PFT level. It probably makes more sense to link it to the management strategy than to the PFT. This needs to be checked. |
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