. Leaf area index (LAI) is an important factor and a key variable which is influenced by many physical, biologi-cal and physiological processes of plant communities. In this study, the ability of RegCM model in simulating LAI, temperature and precipitation using CLM land surface model in two states of static or dynamic vegetation cover within the period of 1991-2005 was investigated. Two general circulation models CanESM2 and EC-Earth were used to setup the boundary conditions. The results showed that the highest Pearson correlation coef-ficient (0.78) between modelled LAI and ERA5 was achieved by CanESM2-RegCM-CLM model. In arid and Mediterranean climates, the CanESM2-RegCM-CLM model presented the best estimates for LAI. For both GCM models, the static vegetation cover tends to overestimate the simulated LAI, whereas the activation of carbon-nitrogen feedback within the models caused underestimation of vegetation cover in the region. Imple-mentation of post-processing method is recommended as the future work to eliminate the model errors and evaluate other agrometeorological indices (e.g. NDVI, EVI) to detect the feedback of carbon-nitrogen cycle.
