Speaker
Description
Climate-driven forest mortality is having an increasingly significant impact on harvesting intensity, the stability of wood flows, and the medium-term availability of timber. However, translating climate signals into operationally meaningful indicators remains challenging, as the strength of the relationship between drought and mortality depends on the spatial scale. This study evaluates the extent to which climatic water balance (CWB) can explain Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) mortality at different levels of forest management in Poland: forest district (operational scale) and regional directorate (strategic scale).
Mixed-effects modelling was employed to distinguish ecological drivers from scale-dependent variability, employing long-term mortality records and high-resolution climate data. The model's predictions were expressed on a logarithmic scale of relative mortality. Drought-related mortality was found to range from approximately 6 × 10³ to 2 × 10⁵ m³ at the regional directorate level (mean standing volume: 61,755,798 m³), and from 2 × 10¹ to 7 × 10² m³ at the forest district level (mean standing volume: 224,213 m³).
The study shows that spatial aggregation strengthens the relationship between drought and mortality. Short-term harvest scheduling and resource allocation are complicated by the strong influence of local site conditions and stochastic disturbances on mortality variability at the forest district level. Local variability diminishes at broader spatial scales, allowing a coherent multi-year drought signal to emerge and impacting mid-term timber supply and processing capacity planning.
The results indicate that spatial scale is an essential component of climate risk assessment for forest operations. Identifying the appropriate level of aggregation enhances mortality forecasting, supports adaptive harvest planning, and makes forest-based value chains more resilient under increasing climate stress.
| Keywords | operations, climat, scaling, mortality |
|---|
