Simulated and observed timings of leaf senescence for <em>Fagus sylvatica</em> (L.) at selected European sites

Together with my co-authors, I have formulated a process-oriented model of leaf senescence according to the leaf development process, the DP3 model. This model clearly stands out from previous models and allows new hypotheses to be made, e.g. about ageing or stress-induced senescence. The DP3 model was as accurate as the previously published models. A comparison with the constant simulation of the average timing of leaf senescence also showed that the models are forced to fall back on this average due to the noisy leaf senescence data, which complicates model evaluation. All these analyses were based on the simulated and observed leaf senescence data, which are made available here., , # Simulated and observed timings of leaf senescence for *Fagus sylvatica* (L.) at selected European sites Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.tht76hf97](10.5061/dryad.tht76hf97) ## Description of the data and file structure The date of leaf senescence was simulated for beech at selected European sites. In particular, the day of year (Doy) when 50% and 100% of the leaves have changed color or have fallen (referred to as the phenological stages LS50 and LS100, respectively) were simulated for the years with corresponding observations between 1950 and 2022. The simulation were based on the DP3 model (Meier et al. 2025) as well as on the previously published models CDD (Dufrêne et al., 2005), DM2 (Delpierre et al., 2009), and PIA (Zani et al., 2020). All models werte driven with climate variables obtained from the E-OBS dataset (Cornes et al., 2018), with CO2 concentration data from Cheng et al. (2022) and Copernicus Climate Change Service (2018), and with leaf area indices from the GIMMS-LAI3g ...,