Creating virtual forests around the globe and analysing their state space

Forests, as one of the most important carbon sinks on earth, are more and more under stress by environmental changes. The dynamics of forests and consequently their functions in general, begin to change. We therefore present a recent model development, called "Forest Factory 2.0″, which generates various virtual forest stands for different biomes on earth. This approach allows to generate forests using the architecture and processes of forest models (here we use the individual-based gap model FORMIND). Using Forest Factory 2.0, we generated 700,000 forest stands in seven different ecoregions. In contrast to the tradition of investigating the development of individual forest stands over time, we used the Forest Factory 2.0 as a tool to gain knowledge about forests by analyzing the state space of forests. We conducted a structural sensitivity analysis to compare the relationships between structural properties and biomass, productivity, as well as species evenness of forests. In this study we analyze the state space of forests in different biomes and demonstrate the potential of this approach for theoretical ecology.