LPJ-GUESS Education Release Notes

LPJ-GUESS is a computer model that simulates the responses of land vegetation and ecosystems to climatic and environmental variation. LPJ-GUESS Education is a learning aid that allows users to apply a version of LPJ-GUESS to any location on the vegetated land surface of the Earth, using it to explore the effects of climatic changes on ecosystems. It is intended for use on intermediate to advanced university courses in the environmental sciences.

LPJ-GUESS (the model) has been under continuous development since the late-1990s and is the product of a collaboration between researchers from Lund University in Sweden, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany and a number of other institutes. LPJ-GUESS Education was created by Ben Smith of Lund University.

Documentation and a bibliography are included in this release and may be accessed following installation from the Windows Start menu or by running the LPJ-GUESS Windows Shell and choosing Help|User's guide.

LPJ-GUESS Education is strictly a learning aid and is not suitable for research use. If you are interested in obtaining a research version of LPJ-GUESS, you are welcome to contact the authors (details below) to discuss collaboration. If your primary interest is the global model LPJ-DGVM, there is extensive information and source code available for download at www.pik-potsdam.de/lpj.

Installation

  1. You require a personal computer with Windows 98/XP/Vista, a relatively fast processor (1 GHz+) and at least 256 MB of RAM memory. Performance on computers with less power than this is likely to be poor.
  2. Download or copy the Windows installer archive (guessedu.zip) to a temporary location on your computer, e.g. the desktop.
  3. Unpack the archive using Windows Explorer (File|Extract all ...) or an extraction tool such as WinZip.
  4. Double-click on the item SETUP or SETUP.EXE to start the installer.
  5. Follow the instructions on the screen.

Copyright/redistribution

Copyright (2006) is held by Ben Smith with coauthors. The Windows installer archive (guessedu.zip), along with the accompanying documentation, may be freely copied or distributed for personal, educational and academic use. All forms of commercial use are prohibited.

Contact/enquiries

http://www.nateko.lu.se/lpj-guess/education

LPJ-GUESS Education Version 2008-08