Tradeoffs in ecosystem services of European forests using a case study approach and a climate-sensitive modelling tool

Facing an uncertain future, european forests are expected to fulfill a range of forest ecosystem services (FES), including timber supply, carbon storage or biodiversity. Using criteria and indicators forest managers can evaluate alternative management options and decision support systems (DSS) help them make decisions considering multiple objectives. Such tools need input on forest development under various scenarios, to obtain robust decisions, such as provided by forest models. We use the simulation results from the project “OptFor-EU” generated by the hybrid forest model PICUS v1.5 for four case study areas in Austria, Italy, Germany and Romania. We utilize six different climate input (3 RCPs, 2 regional climate models) and up to nine management alternatives in simulations until year 2100. The initial stand structure was derived using forest inventory data. We aggregated forest stands (represented by forest types) assuming even distribution of age classes in a hypothetical landscape or region of interest.

We found positive tradeoffs between key forest ecosystem services, FES (carbon sink, biodiversity, harvested wood volume) for selected forest management alternatives. Under a “no active management” scenario, most of the simulated forest stands in the case study areas reached their potential carbon storage in the second half of the century and thus their carbon sink becomes neutral during that period. A surprising result was that selected biodiversity indicators were higher under management scenarios than no management, at least for certain time periods and age classes. Less extensive forest management alternatives may offer tradeoffs between FESs. Next steps are expanding the simulations to additional case study areas and refining and optimizing the forest management, considering more realistic age class distributions and/or varying management by age class.

 

References

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