Florian Hartig Theoretical Ecology & Ecological Data Science

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The NUCOMBog R package for simulating vegetation, water, carbon and nitrogen dynamics in peatlands

Johannes W. M. Pullens, Maurizio Bagnara, Ramiro Silveyra González, Damiano Gianelle, Matteo Sottocornola, Monique M. P. D. Heijmans, Gerard Kiely, Florian Hartig

Ecological Informatics, 40, 35–39 (2017)
Cite this
@article{pullens2017nucombog,
  author = {Johannes W. M. Pullens and Maurizio Bagnara and Ramiro Silveyra González and Damiano Gianelle and Matteo Sottocornola and Monique M. P. D. Heijmans and Gerard Kiely and Florian Hartig},
  title = {The NUCOMBog R package for simulating vegetation, water, carbon and nitrogen dynamics in peatlands},
  journal = {Ecological Informatics},
  volume = {40},
  pages = {35–39},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.1016/j.ecoinf.2017.05.001},
}

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoinf.2017.05.001
Cited by 2 (Google Scholar) · 3 (OpenAlex), as of 07 September 2026

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Abstract

Since peatlands store up to 30% of the global soil organic carbon, it is important to understand how these ecosystems will react to a change in climate and management. Process-based ecosystem models have emerged as important tools for predicting long-term peatland dynamics, but their application is often challenging because they require programming skills. In this paper, we present NUCOMBog, an R package of the NUCOM-Bog model (Heijmans et al. 2008), which simulates the vegetation, carbon, nitrogen and water dynamics of peatlands in monthly time steps. The package complements the model with appropriate functions, such as the calculation of net ecosystem exchange, as well as parallel functionality. As a result, the NUCOMBog R package provides a user-friendly tool for simulating vegetation and biogeochemical cycles/fluxes in peatlands over years/decades, under different management strategies and climate change scenarios, with the option to use all the in-built model analysis capabilities of R, such as plotting, sensitivity analysis or optimization.

What the paper shows and why it matters (AI-generated)

Peatlands store an outsized share of the world's soil carbon relative to their area and are unusually sensitive to drainage and warming, yet a mechanistic tool for simulating their coupled vegetation-water-carbon-nitrogen dynamics wasn't readily available in R before this package. NUCOMBog fills that specific gap; its reach has stayed modest but real, cited in work on hydrological modelling and, fittingly, a paper on triangulating methods in ecological research.