A Software Package for Assessing Terrestrial Planetary Boundaries

Abstract

There is a dearth of assessments of temporal trajectories and spatial patterns of planetary boundaries (PBs – precautionary limits to human interference with nine critical Earth system processes). To facilitate such studies by a generic computation tool, we have developed the R-based, open-source software package ‘boundaries’. It allows to calculate and plot the statuses of different PBs (i.e. if, when, where, and how strongly they are transgressed), based on required variables provided from an external source. The pilot version 1.0 presented here is designed to use outputs from the LPJmL biosphere model, which dynamically simulates processes underlying the PBs for land-system change, freshwater change, nitrogen flows and biosphere integrity. From these data, boundaries derives the four PBs’ statuses at different scales (planetary and corresponding regional boundaries), in a transparent way, following the latest definitions. In an application, we visualise the past and current PB states. We strongly encourage users to enhance boundaries for processing outputs from other models and datasets.

Keywords: planetary boundaries, LPJmL, Earth system, analysis software