Biome-BGC ESI version 1.4.1

Biome-BGC is a process-based biogeochemical model that can be used to simulate carbon, nitrogen and water fluxes of different terrestrial ecosystems. The model can help us to quantify a broad range of ecosystem service indicators. These newly developed measures include: annual wood increment, yearly production of grasslands or croplands, total average carbon stock, annual evapotranspiration, damping of ecosystem daily water outflow, living and dead biomass protecting the soil against erosion, litter and coarse woody debris decomposition rate, and humification rate in the soil. They are unrealistic or even impossible to measure in the field and so they have to be calculated.

The Biome-BGC ESI - Ecosystem Service Indicators service executes a single simulation run at a given geographic location under that distinctive environmental circumstances, and for a specified time-span of years, past and/or future climate scenarios and management options.

The simulations require specific inputs like:

- local daily meteorology input dataset - a number of general ecophysiological constants as essential parameters - local site/soil parameters - annual atmospheric CO2 concentration (optional) - annual nitrogen deposition (optional) - output control settings of Biome-BGC variables - spinup and normal initialization settings

The Biome-BGC Project Database & Management System (BBGCDB) was developed to support users to manage various Biome-BGC ecosystem modelling investigations, and to share related input, parameter, initialisation and output files. It provides also interaction to the Taverna workflows within the environment of the BioVeL Portal. It provides a user friendly interface to select model version and all the other predefined parameter settings and inputs. Two model versions were implemented: Biome-BGC 4.1.1 MPI (Trusilova et al. 2009) and Biome-BGC MuSo 3.0 (Hidy & Barcza 2014).