ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the modeling efforts of terrestrial ecosystems: agricultural land, forestry and other models of terrestrial ecosystems, including soil contamination. The major effort of modeling terrestrial ecosystems by using biogeochemical models has been invested in models of agricultural land, soil contamination threatening the ground water and forestry. An ecological system may also be broken down on the basis of spatial discontinuities. The hierarchies of space and time share many properties. The organic matter submodel considers three different pools of organic matter: added organic matter, biomass and soil organic matter. The model has two components, first, climatic submodels, which account for the day length, solar height, transmission characteristics of the sky, and compute the daily amount of available radiation. The second is, biological submodels, where the expected carbon assimilate production is calculated using the leaf characteristics, amount of intercepted light, and extinction coefficient of the crop.
