Upscaling of spatially explicit and linked time- and space-discrete models simulating vegetation dynamics under climate change

Models applied for simulating the impact of climate change on large scale vegetation dynamics generally face the trade-off between computational expenses (computation time and memory) and modelled detail. Global models often abstract from processes entailing spatial linkages, e.g. species migration, and have too coarse resolutions to depictfrom processes entailing spatial linkages, e.g. species migration, and have too coarse resolutions to depict abiotic microsite heterogeneity. Regional to local models, on the other hand, are more detailed, but their computational expenses prevent applications on large scales. For manageable and accurate simulations of large scale vegetation dynamics, small scale dynamics need to be integrated with large scale applications in a balanced way. Several methods have been proposed and applied to expedite the integration of scales. However, each method has different advantages and drawbacks and the applicability of a method also strongly depends on the initial model and on the