Title: Spatially Continuous Forest Simulator

Abstract: Climate change is profoundly impacting forests, leading to rising mortality rates. Since forests play a critical role in global processes, understanding these impacts is essential. In this talk, we will provide a brief overview of forest modeling approaches, beginning with the discrete, individual-based model SORTIE and extending to models such as LM3PPA, which couple forest dynamics with Earth system models. We then introduce a new spatially continuous forest model that should preserve the dynamics of discrete models, while scaling to much larger spatial domains. This would enable us to capture the influence of environmental gradients on forest clines.