Speaker
Description
Forest management faces increasing uncertainty due to climate-driven changes in forest dynamics, disturbances and growing economic constraints on timber harvesting, particularly in mountainous terrain and areas with limited forest accessibility.
For policy implementation and long-term planning, both in government and the timber industry, it is essential to have estimates about the future provision of ecosystem services (such as timber supply or protective service), because harvesting costs strongly determine economic viability of forest operations/forest management.
Most studies to date neglect or greatly simplify operational factors (e.g. by assuming constant net revenues or constant harvesting costs under all conditions). We present a framework that accounts for harvesting costs that vary with harvesting characteristics and terrain properties, supporting long- term forest growth and management modelling. It dynamically assesses best suitable timber harvesting methods (dynBEST) and estimates associated costs under future forest trajectories.
The framework can be integrated modularly with many forest growth and management models to support forest planning.
We will show an example in which the framework is applied to the full Swiss National Forest Inventory network, covering with more than 6,000 plots a broad gradient of biogeographic regions and topographic conditions: We integrate (i) climate-sensitive, long-term forest simulations with the forest model MASSIMO under alternative management strategies, (ii) assessments of technical feasibility of harvesting options, and (iii) productivity-based modelling of harvesting costs over a simulation period of 100 years.
| Keywords | Timber_Supply; Forest_Modelling;Ecosystem_Services; |
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