Modeling the adaptation of the forest sector to climate change: A coupled approach

Large-scale environmental models have become a vital tool in studying the effects of climate change. Possibly due to the massive computational expense that many of these models require, the representation of social systems within these models is often limited. As part of an ongoing project on improving land-disturbance modeling in the Community Land Model (CLM), we have developed an economically motivated model of timber harvests that can be fully coupled to CLM. The model relies on simulating auctions between profit-maximizing agents in order to solve for a market solution level of timber harvest on the landscape. Using this model, we are able to improve the representation of this social system within CLM in a computationally manageable and unique way.