Background

Climate change will modify forest dynamics and direct (precipitation, temperature) and indirect (disturbance) effects, which will affect production and other ecosystem services such as carbon storage and biodiversity conservation ( Lindner et al., 2014 ). In some areas, modeling and predicting high losses of ecosystem services ( Elkin et al., 2013 ), especially for provisioning and regulating services (eg Mina et al., 2017 ).
Disturbances are key factors as they could intensify in the future. For example, Seidl et al. (2017) found increases in the frequency of drought and windstorm events as well as the effects of climate change. Such disturbances can be moderated by the effects of climate change on critical ecosystem functions (see Reyer et al., 2017 ).
Fostering resilience has become a key target for forest adaptation ( Puettman et al., 2009 ) and must be thought of as a prerequisite for developing the forest bioeconomy ( Winkel 2017 ). Forest resilience will become important as societies will increase the use of forest resources. This can play a major role in limiting forest degradation and associated ecosystem services.
We believe that management strategies that foster structural strength hold strong potentials for developing resilient forests, which warrants and cross-depth analyzes.

Objectives

The project has the following objectives:

  1. Improve knowledge about resistance to disturbances and recovery processes in forest ecosystems
  2. Update a disturbance database to produce forest disturbance scenarios over Europe
  3. Analyse the impacts of disturbances, management and climate change scenarios on ecosystem services with forest models at different scales
  4. Assess the effect of structural complexity on ecosystem services and the value of complexity-based management strategies
  5. Provide recommendations for enhancing forest resilience through adaptive management strategies

Model scale

  • Stand (a few hectares)
  • Landscape (a few thousand hectares; 3 landscapes)
  • Country (Slovenia, France, Germany and Poland)

Poster

You can download the project’s poster here.

I-MAESTRO team

I-MAESTRO Team

Project leader: Patrick Vallet2

WP1 – Data for model calibration, evaluation and initialization – concepts

Jaroslaw Socha*4, Martin Gutsch*3, Louis Konig3, Mahnken Mats3, Matija Klopcic5, Patrick Vallet2, Björn Reineking2, Jean-Matthieu Monnet2, Thomas Cordonnier2, Eric Mermin2, Pascal Tardif2

WP2 – Improving disturbance information and knowledge on recovery processes

Marcus Lindner*1, Thomas Nagel*5, Gal Fidej5, Matteo Cerioni5, Benoît Courbaud2, Georges Kunstler2, Marc Fuhr2, Jaroslaw Socha4, Srdan Keren4

WP3 – Simulating management strategies and provision of ecosystemic services at different scales

Christopher Reyer*3, Mahnken Mats3, Martin Gutsch3, Jaroslaw Socha*4, Luiza Tyminska-Czabanska4, Jean-Matthieu Monnet2, Thomas Cordonnier2, Patrick Vallet2, Raphaël Aussenac2, Benoît Courbaud2, Thomas Nagel5

WP4 – Synthesis on management strategies and forest resilience

Marcus Lindner*1, Thomas Cordonnier*2, Raphaël Aussenac2, Sophie Labonne2, Christopher Reyer3, Jaroslaw Socha4, Srdan Keren4

WP5 – Coordination and dissemination activities

Patrick Vallet*2, Sophie Labonne2, Marcus Lindner1, Jose Bolaños1, Jaroslaw Socha4, Thomas Nagel5

* WP leader 1 EFI, Bonn, Germany 2 INRAE, Grenoble, France 3 PIK, Potsdam, Germany 4 UAK, Krakow, Poland 5 UL, Ljubljana, Slovenia