Forest landscape simulation with LANDIS-II
LANDIS-II is a forest landscape model that simulates tree species succession together with disturbances such as wildfire, insect outbreaks, and harvesting. We design and run LANDIS-II simulation studies that project forest landscape change over large areas and long time horizons.
Current work simulates the historic and future range of variation of British Columbia forest landscapes, using Biomass Succession with the Dynamic Fire and Dynamic Fuel systems, with fire regimes calibrated to observed fire perimeters and ignitions.
The landisutils R package prepares inputs, runs simulations, and post-processes outputs for these studies.
Dr. Chubaty is an ecologist and simulation modeller who builds spatial models of forest landscapes and the species that live in them. He completed his PhD at Simon Fraser University modelling host selection in mountain pine beetle (MPB), followed by postdoctoral research at Université Laval and Natural Resources Canada developing forecasting models of MPB spread.
He runs FOR-CAST Research & Analytics in Calgary, Canada. His recent work
includes LANDIS-II forest landscape simulation studies, landscape
connectivity modelling, and analyses of insect outbreak dynamics, to inform
land management and species-at-risk decisions. He writes open-source R
packages for this work, including grainscape for connectivity analysis,
landisutils for LANDIS-II simulations, and co-developed the SpaDES
simulation platform. He advocates for open data and reproducible workflows.