Multifactor experiments are often advocated as important for advancing terrestrial biosphere models ( TBM s), yet to date, such models have only been tested against single‐factor experiments. We applied 10 TBM s to the multifactor Prairie Heating and CO 2 Enrichment ( PHACE ) experiment in Wyoming, USA . Our goals were to investigate how multifactor experiments can be used to constrain models and to identify a road map for mod...

The ongoing changes in the global climate expose the world's ecosystems not only to increasing CO 2 concentrations and temperatures but also to altered precipitation ( P ) regimes. Using four well‐established process‐based ecosystem models (LPJ, DayCent, ORCHIDEE, TECO), we explored effects of potential P changes on water limitation and net primary production (NPP) in seven terrestrial ecosystems with distinctive vegetation ty...

We evaluated long‐term trends in average maximum and minimum temperatures, threshold temperatures, and growing season in eastern Colorado, USA, to explore the potential shortcomings of many climate‐change studies that either: (1) generalize regional patterns from single stations, single seasons, or a few parameters over short duration from averaging dissimilar stations; or (2) generalize an average regional pattern from coarse...

In many temperate and annual grasslands, above‐ground net primary productivity (NPP) can be estimated by measuring peak above‐ground biomass. Estimates of below‐ground net primary productivity and, consequently, total net primary productivity, are more difficult. We addressed one of the three main objectives of the Global Primary Productivity Data Initiative for grassland systems to develop simple models or algorithms to estim...