PARTEH v1

The Plant Allocation Reactive Transport Extensible Hypotheses (PARTEH) software infrastructure has been added. This module allows FATES to accommodate plants with much greater flexibility in how they are represented (nutrients, multiple discrete spaces for state variables, etc).

This is a minor feature release, as the science changes are small. This is a major API change because this release breaks compatibility with previous versions of the host model API.

Case changes to debug flags

Changes in this release were small. The case of debug flags were changed to lowercase from uppercase. These changes were identified and requested by Erik Kluzek to aid in future compatibility with CESM.

Fire fluxes updates/fixes for leaves/sapwood

This release includes fixes to the fire flux routine for live plants. The fire flux for live plants was updated to remove leaves according to the fraction of the crown scorched by fire. Consumption of branches would burn sapwood and remove stemwood, and will be addressed in a separate issue with separate fluxes. These changes also included more verbose naming of variables. The equation was also updated to remove the minimum evaluation, as the fraction_crown_burned term already has a check on it to confirm it is not greater than 1 within the fire routine.
Contributors: Jacquelyn Shuman

Sapwood allometry house cleaning

This release does not add new features, but mostly does house-cleaning for sapwood allometry. The updates include an update to the parameter latosa_int and latosa_slp, to be inverted and more verbose: sa_per_la_int and sa_per_la_slp. Also, the slope term was updated to respond to increases in height (not diameter). A sapwood area was also output from the function, to aid in hydraulics calculations.
Updates to the parameter file require updates to the default parameter files in E3SM and CTSM used in testing (hence the minor API change).

Variable SLA Profile and Wood CN Ratio

This release adds two features. Marlies Kovenock added the capacity to have variable SLA throughout the canopy depth, increasing as a function of integrated leaf area. Charlie Koven added a dedicated wood CN ratio parameter that effects sapwood respiration rates.

Bug fixes - demotion/promotion precision, growth, seed-decay

This tag contains mostly bug fixes, but also changes that may considered feature improvements. A bug fix was applied to the calculation of target sapwood in allometry. A bug fix was applied to the orderering of allometric targets during and after re-calculation of dbh. A bug fix was applied to a double counting of seed-decay flux (which has improved error magnitude on carbon balance diagnostics). Various updates to comments and in-code documentation, inlcluding a re-defining of intra-cellular co2 concentrations to inter-cellular. Bug fixes were applied to an incorrectly defined constant which was a 4-byte real in an intrinsice expecting 8-byte reals. Finally, the promotion/demotion scheme was refactored to allow higher precisions, and an area correction scheme was re-ordered to move area out of the largest patch instead of the oldest.

Variable Soil Depths and Expanded History Dimensions

This release contains a change to the interface with E3SM/CTSM. Please ensure that the corresponding API change has been issued in the version of those drivers.

Two changes are contained in this release. Firstly, new history dimensions (age x pft) and (size x age x pft) have been added, along with corresponding new history variables. New history variables are also available to help with lidar comparisons. Thanks Charlie Koven. Secondly, the host land-models CTSM and E3SM now have the capacity to have variable depths of coils at the column (equivalent to fates site) level, and FATES now allocates soil depths accordingly. To facilitate this, a modest refactor of rooting depth functions has been started.

FATES Hydro

This release contains the beta version of plant hydraulics by Christoffersen and Xu et al.. Plant hydraulics has been tested an developed at key sites, but limited testing has been performed globally and will be developed in later releases. Hydraulics also has limited support during growth, and some features need to be added to address the flux of water bound in dying vegetation back into the ecosystem and water-balances on newly recruited plants.

The API tag was incremented to denote a new parameter was added, and thus parameter files must now include the scalar: fates_hydr_kmax_rsurf.

Bug fix - Stomatal conductance scaling

This release is a bug fix on the calculation of stomatal conductance, and how it is scaled from leaf layer to cohort. Fixes also correct gpp and dark respiration calculations in isolated cases of un-ful leaf layers.
This is a result changing release.

Bug fixes - pointer-pointers , respiration and memory leaks

This release includes three bug fixes.
Patch and cohort pointers to sites that pointed to spread terms were being forgotten during calls to calculate crown areas, and thus the site pointer was removed. Respiration accumulation was added to restarts. A memory leak was fixed during cohort termination.