Linking contemporary vegetation models with spatially explicit animal population models

Spatially explicit models for animal populations (SEPMs) necessarily embody assumptions about plant community structure and dynamics. In research focused on questions with short time horizons, however, the spatial patterning of vegetation can be reasonably approximated as a fixed landscape templet for animal population dynamics. But if one needs to consider longer time scales (eg decades to centuries), landscapes will be dynamic. Models of vegetation dynamics provide useful tools for predicting landscape dynamics. The authors outline the sorts of output from vegetation models that might be useful in animal SEPMs and discuss recent forest simulators, which predict with reasonable accuracy some variables (eg tree species composition), but which, to date, are quite poor for others (eg seed production). -from Authors