NEON1 - Six selected abiotic variables - Potential Vegetation
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Comments/Observations

• All of these represent new analyses

• While these results don't look too bad, they are less spatially cohesive than the results from IA shown at http://research.esd.ornl.gov/~hnw/neon/tests.

• I would argue for including 4 additional characteristics, as a minimum:
• solar insolation during the non-growing season
• number of days with measurable precipitation during the growing season
• number of days with measurable precipitation during the non-growing season
• Compound Topographic Index

My justification for these additions:

• We have not included solar insolation during the non-growing season. This is important for evergreen ecosystems.

• We have not included information about the distribution of precipitation over the growing and nongrowing season, only the sum total of that precipitation. The distribution of rainfall within season is overwhelmingly important to plants.

• We have not included any information about slope position, i.e., hilltop, mid-slope, cove. This is a surrogate for soil moisture, which, while impossible to get direclty, is widely acknowledged to be critical to vegetation. Compound Topographic Index could easily provide this surrogate information.




Even if we add the above information,

• We have not included information about degree-day heat or cold sums. Many biological phenomena are known to respond to heat and cold sums, and can be predicted by them.

• We have not included information about day/night diurnal temperature differences. This is a surrogate for many things, including vegetation type/structure, soils and geology, and urbanization.

• We have not included any significant information about soil depth or fertility, i.e., organic matter or nitrogen content of soil. All we have is plant-available water, which is a soil texture property.




• We also have included NO INFORMATION on actual existing vegetation. So this result is about POTENTIAL VEGETATION ONLY. There can be substantial differences between existing vegetation and potential vegetation at many sites. We plan to include this information during Siting Steps 2 and 3.

• No information has been included about ecosystem performance, i.e., GPP, NPP, respiration. This information is highly derived, and may be less certain than more direct observations. Therefore, it will not be included.

For additional information contact:

William W. Hargrove

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Environmental Sciences Division

Building 1507, Room 211

Mail Stop 6407

Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6407

(865) 241-2748

(865) 574-4665 fax

hnw@fire.esd.ornl.gov