Abstract

The plant hydrodynamic approach represents a recent advancement to land surface modeling, in which stomatal conductance responds to water availability in the xylem rather than in the soil. To provide a realistic representation of tree hydrodynamics, hydrodynamic models must resolve processes at the level of a single modelled tree, and then scale the resulting fluxes to the canopy and land surface. While this tree-to-canopy scaling is trivial in a homogeneous canopy, mixed-species canopies require careful representation of the species properties and a scaling approach that results in a realistic description of both the canopy and individual-tree hydrodynamics, as well as leaf-level fluxes from the canopy and their forcing. Here, we outline advantages and pitfalls of three commonly used approaches for representing mixed-species forests in land surface models, and present a new framework for scaling vegetation characteristics and fluxes in mixed-species forests. The new formulation scales fluxes from the tree- to canopy-level in an energy- and mass-conservative way and allows for a consistent multi-species canopy description for hydrodynamic models.