The QUINCY terrestrial biosphere model with coupled carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles

The QUINCY model (Thum et al. 2019) is a terrestrial biosphere model tracking the flows of carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, as well as a number of isotopes for a number of pre-defined terrestrial ecosystem types at a half-hourly time-step. These biogeochemical cycles are coupled to the represenation of biogeophysics (surface water and energy exchanges), and longer-term vegetation dynamics. The QUINCY model has originally been developed to run for individual, but globally distributed sites driven by surface meteorology (QUINCY standalone), but has now been integrated into the ICON-Land framework (IQJ) to faciliate global simulations either driven by re-analysis forcing, or interactively coupled to the global circulation model ICON, or its Earth System Model variant ICON-XPP.

License

The QUINCY standalone source code is available under the terms of the 3-Clause BSD License.

Access to the QUINCY code

The QUINCY standalone source code is available from the QUINCY git repository (doi: 10.17871/quincy-model-2019). The ICON-Land model, including the QUINCY configuration, is available from the ICON-Land git repository.

QUINCY Team and Governance

QUINCY originated at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, Jena, Germany as part of the QUINCY ERC project. It is now developed by an international team of researchers, including the Finnish Meteorological Institute, Universities of Bern, Hamburg, Leipzig, the MPI for Meteorology and Trinity College Dublin.

Governance structures in QUINCY are still being build up, but inquiries will be discussed in the steering committee, comprised of PIs from contributing institutions, and representatives of PhD-students, PostDocs and Scientific Programmers. Inquiries should be send to the chair of the Steering Group (Sönke Zaehle)

Fair-use Policy for the QUINCY model

The QUINCY team encourage its collaborative use for research. The fair-use policy is designed as a win-win opportunity for both users and developers of the QUINCY environment. It warrants the continuation of ambitious model developments. The fair-use policy is designed to ensure that the individuals who develop the QUINCY model receive proper credit for their work, and to foster collaborative work with the model. The policy applies to the use of any present and future model version. If your work using the QUINCY model directly competes with ongoing research of the QUINCY team, we request to be given the opportunity to submit a manuscript before you submit one that uses the QUINCY model, or invite you to execute this work in a collaborative manner.

Recognition of intellectual contributions to the QUINCY model will be ensured by:

• Offering co-authorship on any publication that benefits of recent developments improvements in the QUINCY model. We assume that an agreement on such matters will be reached before publishing and/or use of the model/data for publication. We deliberately refrain from specifying ‘recent’ as it should be a function of the intellectual contribution and the exposure this contribution already received. 
• Discussing, early on, intended usage of the QUINCY model. This discussion should prevent uses and/or applications of the QUINCY model which are in conflict with the plans of the QUINCY team. When using the model code or output, please reference the source of the model and its scientific documentation as a citation. 

Use of follow-up recent versions

The QUINCY model is a continuously evolving research tool. Despite the efforts of documenting and validating release versions before their publication, new users are likely to require help to correctly use the QUINCY model and its run environment. It is therefore highly recommended to stay in active communication with the QUINCY team. Requests for support from unregistered users or non-academic users will not be considered.

We may need your expertise

The MPI for Biogeochemistry contributes to a better understanding of the interactions between human activities in the Earth System, environment and climate dynamics at different time scales. If you have a PhD in mathematics, physics, engineering, computer science, meteorology, or physiology, or you believe that your skills could contribute to the development of QUINCY model, feel free to send us your CV, a customized letter of motivation and names of people who are willing to act as references.

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