The evidence of stand development stages in simulations by an individual-tree growth simulator

Abstract

Individual-tree growth models have often been evaluated at the stand level in terms of stand increment or the development of stand density, but rarely in conceptual terms of natural stand dynamics. This study addresses the stand development stage concept developed for natural forests and shows how individual-tree growth models can be evaluated in this respect. For this purpose, the individual-tree growth simulator PrognAus was used to simulate the development of three sites for 2500 years, and a statistical classification model and a rule-based classification scheme were used to identify development stages in the output of the simulator. A comparison of the simulated stages with stages observed in a natural forest in terms of the stand volume and a comparison of the simulated stages with hypotheses from the literature in terms of volume, change of volume, and stand density were performed to determine if the simulations are consistent with the theory.