Speaker
Description
Mountain forests often provide protection against gravitational natural hazards and supply multiple ecosystem services but are increasingly vulnerable to climate-change-enhanced disturbances due to legacies of past spruce (Picea abies (L.) H. Karst.) promotion. To optimize the allocation of limited operational resources, forest managers must spatially prioritize interventions that balance management costs with timber revenue and forest resistance and resilience ensuring the long-term protective function of these ecosystems.
We present a novel approach for the spatial prioritization of management interventions over a mid-term horizon, considering both silviculture and harvesting operations. We demonstrate the process through a case study area of a Swiss mountain forest. The process includes: (1) a spatial optimization method to delineate operationally coherent forest management units as the basis for prioritization; (2) qualitative and quantitative assessments of silvicultural benefits for forest resistance and resilience under two scenarios with different harvesting intensities (25% and 50% removal of the standing volume); and (3) a quantification of the associated harvesting, planting and thinning costs and of the net revenue for each management scenario.
Our results indicate that the more intense scenario produced a negative net revenue five times higher than that of the less intense scenario. This substantially reduces the area that can be managed given the same limited financial resources. However, the more intense management scenario offered superior silvicultural benefits by reducing mid-term disturbance predisposition and enhancing the overall long-term resistance and resilience. These findings highlight the critical trade-off between maximizing silvicultural benefits for forest resistance and resilience and operating within economic constraints.
| Keywords | "Optimization1; Disturbances2; Harvesting3; Silviculture4" |
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