Welcome to the FATES Users Guide

FATES (Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator) is a numerical terrestrial ecosystem model. Its development and support is primarily supported by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, through the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment - Tropics (NGEE-T) project.

Note

This documentation is currently under development.

Documentation structure

This document is structured in four parts:

• Tutorials
• FATES User’s Guide
• FATES Developer’s Guide
• FATES Technical Document

The tutorial will help the new user’s and developers orient themselves to fates. The user’s guide is concerned with providing researchers with information on running the FATES model. The developer’s guide focuses on helping researchers and engineers contribute to the FATES model code. Both the user and developer guide sections follow a common structure comprised of three sub-sections:

• How-to: Straight forward recipes for common tasks

• Overview: Narrative discussions of the concepts

• Reference: Description of specific code procedures and routines

This structure adapts the Divio documentation framework.

Technical Documentation

The Technical Documentation for FATES detailing the scientific underpinning of the model is hosted as a Read The Docs Subprojects within this User’s Guide. As a subproject both the guide and the techincal documentation are searchable through the index in this User’s Guide.

Getting Help

If you have questions about using fates that are not answered by this documentation, please reach out to us at the fates github discussions board. We will strive to update this documentation to cover answers provided in that forum as timely as possible.

To receive email updates about forthcoming release tags, regular meeting notifications, and other important announcements, please join the FATES Google group.

Requesting changes to this documentation

The repository for this document can be accessed by clicking on the “Edit on GitHub” text in the upper right hand corner or can be found at: https://github.com/ngeet/fates-users-guide. If there is information in this guide that you would like to have added or errors that need to be addressed, please submit an issue to the fates-users-guide github repository.

Please note that as a Read The Docs Subprojects, the Technical Documentation for FATES has a seperate repository from the User’s Guide repository. If there is information in the technical documentation that you would like to have added or errors that need to be addressed, please submit an issue to the fates-docs github repository.