Florian Hartig

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ProfoundData

An R interface to the PROFOUND database of European forest data for evaluating vegetation models.

GitHubDatabase (DOI)

Downloads per year

13,227 downloads from the Posit (RStudio) CRAN mirror since 2020, through 27 October 2026

Cited 76 times on Google Scholar (as of 29 October 2026)

ProfoundData is an R interface to the PROFOUND database, which collects data for evaluating vegetation models and simulating climate impacts at the scale of forest stands. For nine forest sites across Europe it contains site descriptions and soil, climate, CO₂, nitrogen-deposition, tree, stand and remote-sensing data; for five of them also time series of carbon fluxes. The package downloads the database and provides functions to query and plot it.

A shared dataset lets different forest models be benchmarked against the same observations, rather than against whatever data each modelling team happened to have. The database was produced by COST Action FP1304 PROFOUND and is openly available (doi:10.5880/PIK.2020.006).

The package was archived from CRAN in June 2025 and remains available from GitHub. The database itself is unaffected.

Authors: Florian Hartig (maintainer), Ramiro Silveyra Gonzalez, Christopher Reyer, Mats Mahnken. Contributors: Friedrich Bohn.

Paper describing ProfoundData

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)

doi:10.5194/essd-12-1295-2020preprint76 citations

Citations

ProfoundData has been cited 76 times on Google Scholar as of 29 October 2026. These are the citations of the paper describing it. The chart shows how they are distributed over the years, as of 20 October 2026; the 2026 figure covers the year up to that date.

Citations per year

Widely cited work citing ProfoundData

The most-cited articles that cite ProfoundData or its paper, ranked by their own citation count in OpenAlex as of 29 October 2026; the group's own papers are left out.

  1. Scenario setup and forcing data for impact model evaluation and impact attribution within the third round of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP3a) Katja Frieler et al. (2024), Geoscientific model development · 155 citations
  2. Plant respiration: Controlled by photosynthesis or biomass? Alessio Collalti et al. (2019), Global Change Biology · 135 citations
  3. CHELSA-W5E5: daily 1 km meteorological forcing data for climate impact studies Dirk Nikolaus Karger et al. (2023), Earth system science data · 114 citations
  4. Tackling unresolved questions in forest ecology: The past and future role of simulation models Isabelle Maréchaux et al. (2021), Ecology and Evolution · 102 citations
  5. Beyond ecosystem modeling: A roadmap to community cyberinfrastructure for ecological data‐model integration Istem Fer et al. (2020), Global Change Biology · 90 citations

All citing works on Google Scholar →