This website is a portal to a range of ecological models developed at and/or used by researchers at Penn State University. The site will eventually include models and tools for several programs, including biogeochemistry, hydrology, agroecology, and critical zone science.
Agroecological models. This portal provides access to biophysical simulation models of agricultural and natural systems. These models range in complexity from point simulation (i.e. one dimensional) to spatially explicit watershed models. The links below provides information on how to install and execute each featured model. .
The HydroTerre Data System is a data infrastructure that enables research on water model development on a national scale. It represents a robust, reusable, and extensible framework of data management building blocks, and demonstrates the utility of these infrastructure tools that scale over geo-spatial extents such as rivers, river basins, and systems of rivers. HydroTerre aggregates and pre-processes essential terrestrial data from federal agencies at different geospatial resolutions and over varying temporal scales.
The Penn State Integrated Hydrologic Model (PIHM) is a multiprocess, multi-scale hydrologic model where the major hydrological processes are fully coupled using the semi-discrete finite volume method. The model itself is "tightly-coupled" with PIHMgis, an open-source Geographical Information System designed for PIHM.
Geologists tell us that we live in the Anthropocene, the period marked by humanity's global transformation of the environment. More than half of Earth's terrestrial surface is now plowed, pastured, fertilized, irrigated, drained, fumigated, bulldozed, compacted, eroded, reconstructed, manured, mined, logged, or converted to new uses. These activities have long-lasting effects on life-sustaining processes of the near-surface environment, recently termed Earth's “critical zone”.