It can take Mother Nature 1,000 years to grow a forest. But Nikolay Strigul, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics at Washington State University Vancouver, can grow one on a computer in three weeks.
He and Jean Lienard, a mathematics postdoctoral researcher, created the first computer simulation that grows realistic forests down to the branches, leaves and roots of individual trees. They are using the simulation, detailed in a new paper in Royal Society Open Science, to determine how drought, warmer weather, more frequent wildfires and other climate-related changes will affect forests across North America.