A regional model of vegetation dynamics was revised to include land use as a constraint to vegetation dynamics and primary production processes. The model was applied to a forest transect in eastern China (NSTEC, North-South transect of eastern China) to investigate the responses of the transect to possible future climatic change. The simulation result indicated that land use has profound effects on vegetation transition and primary production. In particular, land use reduced competition among vegetation classes and tended to result in less evergreen broadleaf forests but more shrubs and grasses in the transect area. The simulation runs with land use constraint also gave much more realistic estimation about net primary productivity as well as responses of the productivity to future climatic change along the transect. The simulations for future climate scenarios projected by general circulation models (GCM) with doubled atmospheric CO2 concentration predicted that deciduous broadleaf forests would increase, but conifer forests, shrubs and grasses would decrease. The overall effects of doubling CO2 and climatic changes on NSTEC were to produce an increased net primary productivity (NPP) at equilibrium for all seven GCM scenarios. The predicted range of NPP variation in the north is much larger than that in the south.
