For the area, there is any way to change acres to km or meters before running the model? Or do you run it in acres, and then when you export the files you change the scale from acres to km or m before making the graphs in R?
Under the Projection Definitions for your project, you can set the units for both timesteps and area under the Terminology tab. For example you could change the areas from Acres to Km2 or Ha if you prefer metric units.