Future climate impacts on the forest of the Sierra Nevada, California. Modelling forest dynamics using SORTIE-ND

The Sierra Nevadan mountain range, situated in California, experienced severe droughts followed by very wet winters during the past years, and extreme climatic events will become more frequent and more intense with ongoing global changes. Individual-based forest simulators can be useful tools to study and forecast the effects of climate change on diverse forests. We used the forest simulator SORTIE-ND to model the dynamics of the mountainous forest in the Sierra Nevada and then to project the forest responses to changing climate over the next century.