Grass-dominated ecosystems cover wide areas of the land surface yet have received far less attention from the Earth System Model (ESM) community. This limits model projections of ecosystem dynamics in response to global change and coupled vegetation-climate dynamics. We used the Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator (FATES), a dynamic vegetation demography model, to determine ecosystem sensitivity to alternate, observed grass allometries and biophysical traits, and evaluated model performance in capturing California C