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Mathematical modelling is widely used for estimating the carbon stocks and fluxes of forest soils, for example to meet the reporting requirements set in the Kyoto protocol. An essential prerequisite for numerical parameter estimation from experimental data is the a priori global identifiability of the model, which tells whether the available data contain enough information to unequivocally estimate all the unknown parameters of the postulated model. For soil models especially, this is a justified question, since typically there is a lack of experimentally verifiable counterparts to the conceptual compartments they contain. In this work, the a priori global identifiability analysis of a simple soil carbon model Yasso, with respect to the currently measurable soil carbon data, was performed for the first time. To do this, a recently proposed method based on differential algebraic concepts was used. The above soil carbon model, as it is, was not globally identifiable. The requirements for both soil measurements and model structure to meet the global identifiability of the model were proposed and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mathematical modelling is widely used for estimating the carbon stocks and fluxes of forest soils, for example to meet the reporting requirements set in the Kyoto protocol. An essential prerequisite for numerical parameter estimation from experimental data is the a priori global identifiability of the model, which tells whether the available data contain enough information to unequivocally estimate all the unknown parameters of the postulated model. For soil models especially, this is a justified question, since typically there is a lack of experimentally verifiable counterparts to the conceptual compartments they contain. In this work, the a priori global identifiability analysis of a simple soil carbon model Yasso, with respect to the currently measurable soil carbon data, was performed for the first time. To do this, a recently proposed method based on differential algebraic concepts was used. The above soil carbon model, as it is, was not globally identifiable. The requirements for both soil measurements and model structure to meet the global identifiability of the model were proposed and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]