Articles | Volume 19, issue 5
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-19-1043-2023
https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-19-1043-2023
Research article
 | 
30 May 2023
Research article |  | 30 May 2023

Refining data–data and data–model vegetation comparisons using the Earth mover's distance (EMD)

Manuel Chevalier, Anne Dallmeyer, Nils Weitzel, Chenzhi Li, Jean-Philippe Baudouin, Ulrike Herzschuh, Xianyong Cao, and Andreas Hense

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Cited articles

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Short summary
Data–data and data–model vegetation comparisons are commonly based on comparing single vegetation estimates. While this approach generates good results on average, reducing pollen assemblages to single single plant functional type (PFT) or biome estimates can oversimplify the vegetation signal. We propose using a multivariate metric, the Earth mover's distance (EMD), to include more details about the vegetation structure when performing such comparisons.
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