Florian Hartig Theoretical Ecology & Ecological Data Science

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The PROFOUND database for evaluating vegetation models and simulating climate impacts on European forests

Christopher P. O. Reyer, Ramiro Silveyra Gonzalez, Klara Dolos, Florian Hartig, Ylva Hauf, Matthias Noack, Petra Lasch-Born, Thomas Rötzer, Hans Pretzsch, Henning Meesenburg, Stefan Fleck, Markus Wagner, Andreas Bolte, Tanja G. M. Sanders, Pasi Kolari, Annikki Mäkelä, Timo Vesala, Ivan Mammarella, Jukka Pumpanen, Alessio Collalti, Carlo Trotta, Giorgio Matteucci, Ettore D'Andrea, Lenka Foltýnová, Jan Krejza, Andreas Ibrom, Kim Pilegaard, Denis Loustau, Jean-Marc Bonnefond, Paul Berbigier, Delphine Picart, Sébastien Lafont, Michael Dietze, David Cameron, Massimo Vieno, Hanqin Tian, Alicia Palacios-Orueta, Victor Cicuendez, Laura Recuero, Klaus Wiese, Matthias Büchner, Stefan Lange, Jan Volkholz, Hyungjun Kim, Joanna A. Horemans, Friedrich Bohn, Jörg Steinkamp, Alexander Chikalanov, Graham P. Weedon, Justin Sheffield, Flurin Babst, Iliusi Vega del Valle, Felicitas Suckow, Simon Martel, Mats Mahnken, Martin Gutsch, Katja Frieler

Earth System Science Data, 12(2), 1295–1320 (2020)
Cite this
@article{reyer2020profound,
  author = {Christopher P. O. Reyer and Ramiro Silveyra Gonzalez and Klara Dolos and Florian Hartig and Ylva Hauf and Matthias Noack and Petra Lasch-Born and Thomas Rötzer and Hans Pretzsch and Henning Meesenburg and Stefan Fleck and Markus Wagner and Andreas Bolte and Tanja G. M. Sanders and Pasi Kolari and Annikki Mäkelä and Timo Vesala and Ivan Mammarella and Jukka Pumpanen and Alessio Collalti and Carlo Trotta and Giorgio Matteucci and Ettore D'Andrea and Lenka Foltýnová and Jan Krejza and Andreas Ibrom and Kim Pilegaard and Denis Loustau and Jean-Marc Bonnefond and Paul Berbigier and Delphine Picart and Sébastien Lafont and Michael Dietze and David Cameron and Massimo Vieno and Hanqin Tian and Alicia Palacios-Orueta and Victor Cicuendez and Laura Recuero and Klaus Wiese and Matthias Büchner and Stefan Lange and Jan Volkholz and Hyungjun Kim and Joanna A. Horemans and Friedrich Bohn and Jörg Steinkamp and Alexander Chikalanov and Graham P. Weedon and Justin Sheffield and Flurin Babst and Iliusi Vega del Valle and Felicitas Suckow and Simon Martel and Mats Mahnken and Martin Gutsch and Katja Frieler},
  title = {The PROFOUND database for evaluating vegetation models and simulating climate impacts on European forests},
  journal = {Earth System Science Data},
  volume = {12},
  number = {2},
  pages = {1295–1320},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.5194/essd-12-1295-2020},
}

DOI: 10.5194/essd-12-1295-2020
Cited by 75 (Google Scholar) · 62 (OpenAlex), as of 07 September 2026

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Abstract

Process-based vegetation models are widely used to predict local and global ecosystem dynamics and climate change impacts. Due to their complexity, they require careful parameterization and evaluation to ensure that projections are accurate and reliable. The PROFOUND Database provides a wide range of empirical data on European forests to calibrate and evaluate vegetation models that simulate climate impacts at the forest stand scale. A particular advantage of this database is its wide coverage of multiple data sources at different hierarchical and temporal scales, together with environmental driving data as well as the latest climate scenarios. Specifically, it provides general site descriptions, soil, climate, CO2, nitrogen deposition, tree and forest stand level, and remote sensing data for nine contrasting forest stands distributed across Europe, and for a subset of five sites, time series of carbon fluxes, atmospheric heat conduction and soil water. The climate and nitrogen deposition data contain several datasets for the historic period and a wide range of future climate change scenarios following the Representative Concentration Pathways, plus pre-industrial climate simulations that allow for model runs aimed at disentangling the contribution of climate change to observed forest productivity changes. The database is available freely as an SQLite relational database or ASCII flat file version, and can also be accessed via the ProfoundData R package, which provides basic functions to explore, plot and extract the data for model set-up, calibration and evaluation.

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

Forest models are normally evaluated against whatever data a research group happens to already have, which makes it nearly impossible to compare results across models fairly. PROFOUND fixes that by assembling site, climate, soil and flux data for nine European forest stands into one open, common dataset, accessible via its own R package — infrastructure, but infrastructure that later underpinned this group's own 13-model European forest benchmark and continues to feed carbon-flux and management-optimisation studies today.