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Abstract

Human land-use activities have  influenced the Earth’s climate system by significantly altering biogeochemical and biogeophysical properties at local to planetary scales. To constrain the precise magnitude and characterization of land-use effects on climate and thereby reduce the uncertainty in the accuracy of future projections, the land-use harmonization (LUH2) dataset was developed to link historical land-use data and future projections in a standard format required by climate models. LUH2 includes updated inputs, higher spatial resolution (~50x the information used in CMIP5), more detailed land-use transitions, the addition of important agricultural management layers and is a part of the entry card for models participating in CMIP6. By developing an expanded and fully consistent treatment of land-use of in ACME Land Model (ALM) will eliminate major sources of within model error/uncertainty, and will give ACME a unique capability among global models. The science questions will be focussed on assessing the sensitivity of the climate system to potentially altered land-use activities. To quantify this, model developments to enable ALM to ingest and utilize LUH2 outputs, will be specifically focused on EPIC task LG-144: 1. Splitting primary and secondary land-use classes into forested and non-forested lands; 2.Disaggregation of grazing lands into managed pasture lands and range lands and 3. Including multiple crop functional classes in ALM, and EPIC task LG-145: developing and implementing fully consistent (1 carbon cycle) historical land-use treatment for ACME.

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