What the Nutrient Cycling Model (NuCM) Tells Us about Nutrient Budgets.

The Nutrient Cycling Model (NuCM) has been used to simulate a variety of manipulations and perturbations in several forest ecosystems. In some cases, the model has performed well in the sense that it mimics the real world; in such instances, however, we learn very little new about the ecosystem in question. Much more information and insight is usually gained when the model fails to mimic the real ecosystem because this forces us to question our collective understanding of nutrient cycling processes as manifested in the NuCM model and to pose new questions and experiments that might shed further light on such processes. This presentation reviews some of the interesting failures of the NuCM model and what they suggest as to gaps in our understanding and possible lines of inquiry to fill these gaps.