Sensitivity in ecological modeling: from local to regional scales

Global climate change and underlying feedbacks of the terrestrial ecosystems constitute one of the most challenging environmental issues of the present age. The endeavor to understand the complex interactions between climate system and land surface has stimulated active researches in terrestrial ecological modeling. It has been generally acknowledged that only by adopting a systematic approach and taking the land surface components as a whole by modeling strategies can many pressing environmental and climate change problems be fully understood theoretically at relative large, even global scales. With the fast-growing model complexity, the role of global sensitivity analysis (GSA) is more prominent in model correctness validation and parameter calibration. In this chapter, we discuss some typical applications of GSA in ecological modeling, e.g., parameter sensitivity analysis including its temporal feature, spatial application of social-ecological modeling with scenario settings, and specific computing strategies to cope with the huge amount of model runs in GSA. We also discuss the sensitivity of social-ecological modeling to land map errors. We conclude that GSA is an essential step in ecological modeling development and calibration, but care should be taken when extrapolating GSA results to different regions in model simulation due to its strong reliance on model forcing data.