Harmonising  plant functional type distributions for evaluating Earth system models

Dallmeyer, Anne; Claussen, Martin; Brovkin, Victor

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-15-335-2019

Articles | Volume 15, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-15-335-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-15-335-2019

© Author(s) 2019. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 15, issue 1

Research article

| Highlight paper

|

18 Feb 2019

Research article | Highlight paper |

| 18 Feb 2019

Harmonising plant functional type distributions for evaluating Earth system models

Anne Dallmeyer, Martin Claussen, and Victor Brovkin

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Final revised paper (published on 18 Feb 2019)
Preprint (discussion started on 06 Apr 2018)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Valuable methodology but key literature overlooked; is this the right journal for this manuscript?', Anonymous Referee #1, 22 Jun 2018
- AC1: 'Response to Anonymous Referee #1', Anne Dallmeyer, 06 Nov 2018
RC2: 'Review of Dallmeyer et al. “Harmonizing plant functional type distributions for evaluating Earth System Models”', Anonymous Referee #2, 20 Aug 2018
- AC2: 'Response to Anonymous Referee #2', Anne Dallmeyer, 06 Nov 2018
RC3: 'review for the article entitled “Harmonizing plant functional type distributions for evaluating Earth System Models” by Anne Dallmeyer, Martin Claussen and Victor Brovkin', Anonymous Referee #3, 22 Aug 2018
- AC3: 'Response to Anonymous Referee #3', Anne Dallmeyer, 06 Nov 2018

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (07 Nov 2018) by Denis-Didier Rousseau

AR by Anne Dallmeyer on behalf of the Authors (04 Dec 2018) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (05 Dec 2018) by Denis-Didier Rousseau

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (08 Jan 2019)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Review of

Harmonizing plant functional type distributions for evaluating Earth System Models

By Anne Dallmeyer, et al.

This is my review of the revised version of this manuscript. Generally the authors have done a thorough job of responding to the reviewers’ comments and the manuscript is substantially improved. I stand by my major comment on the previous version of this manuscript and am a little disappointed that the authors did not make an attempt to use Delta-V alongside Kappa to make a quantitative measure of the difference between vegetation maps and gridded maps and point-scale biomizations of pollen data. Even if the authors believe that the differences between mega-biomes are so substantial that Delta-V is not necessary, they effectively equate the difference between tropical rainforest and tundra as being qualitatively the same as that between temperate and boreal forests. At the very, very least, reference to Sykes et al. (1999) should be made in the manuscript, along with a call for using Delta-V in future studies (as the authors do in their responses to the reviewers document).

Nevertheless, the authors made a bona fide effort to respond to the rest of my comments and those of the other reviewer. While the manuscript is still rather long and tedious to read, and needs a thorough copyediting to improve the English language presentation, it should be acceptable for publication after minor revision. I have just two detailed comments on the revised manuscript below.

Line 383-384
The statement “…warm-temperate forest shares most subtropical tree species with the tropical evergreen forest (Ni et al, 2010)” is simply not true, the reference to Ni et al. (2010) notwithstanding. Real warm-temperate forests are floristically very distinct from tropical evergreen forests, as I wrote in my previous comments. In the limited case of taxa that are commonly found in pollen spectra, there may be some commonality at the genera or family level, and in “model world” there may be overlap in the PFT definitions, but this statement is misleading and must be further qualified, or deleted.

Lines 528-533, 557-558, and Figure 6
It is interesting to note that the new PFT-based biomization method presented in this paper does not represent a large improvement over the traditional, offline climate-BIOME1/4-based method, except under certain circumstances such as the South American tropical forest area presented in Table D1. I suspect that in these places where there is a large difference between PFT-based and Climate-based may be because the vegetation models embedded in the ESMs are highly tuned to be adapted to the inherent biases in simulated climate present in the parent ESM, while an offline vegetation model is tuned to perform with the “observed” climate (e.g., from CRU). If the authors agree, it would be worth adding a sentence in the manuscript conclusions to acknowledge this point.

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (24 Jan 2019) by Denis-Didier Rousseau

AR by Anne Dallmeyer on behalf of the Authors (01 Feb 2019) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

A simple but powerful method for the biomisation of plant functional type distributions is introduced and tested for six different dynamic global vegetation models based on pre-industrial and palaeo-simulations. The method facilitates the direct comparison between vegetation distributions simulated by different Earth system models and between model results and the pollen-based biome reconstructions. It is therefore a powerful tool for the evaluation of Earth system models.