Application of Vegetation Models in India for Understanding the Forest Ecosystem Processes

Abstract

Forest ecosystems are one ofthe complex systems that provide essential goods and services to support human survival. Various processes of a forest ecosystem are interlinked to each other to make the system complex and unique. Researchers have been striving to understand the interlinked processes to manage the forests in a sustainable manner. The growing interests ofresearchers in understanding the physical structure and the functioning of forests has attracted the attention of other disciplines of science. As a result, forestry research has been supported by other emerging disciplines such as the use of remote sensing, geographical information system, bioinformatics, machine learning, advanced analytics, simulation, etc. The development and testing of vegetation models is one of the discipline that integrates the application of ever emerging new advance tools. Researchers have been making the effort to represent the physical and physiological characteristics of forests in a virtual environment using computers. This has paved the way for the development of various algorithms and models using computers. Models provide an opportunity to visualize a system in a simplistic way which is otherwise complex. The authors present here various features ofmodels used in forestry, the present generation of dynamic global vegetation models, opportunities and limitations of using models, the need for future research and initiatives by Forest Research Institute (FRI), Dehradun in the application and development of vegetation models.