I-MAESTRO – Innovative forest MAnagEment STrategies for a Resilient biOeconomy under climate change and disturbances was accepted for funding after the second proposal evaluation stage. The project is coordinated by IRSTEA (France) with EFI-Bonn as a partner.
The main aim of I-MAESTRO is to improve the scientific basis for developing management strategies that increase resilience of the bioeconomy to future natural disturbances and climate change, while also maintaining a high level of wood production, carbon storage, and habitat quality for biodiversity.

The project has the following objectives:

• review knowledge on forest disturbances and forest resilience to synthesize and improve evidence on resistance to disturbances and recovery processes; develop an updated disturbance database (Schelhaas et al. 2003) to produce forest disturbance scenarios over Europe;
• simulate the impacts of disturbances, management and climate change scenarios on wood production, carbon storage, and biodiversity conservation (resilience, provisioning) at different scales (stand, landscape and the European regional level);
• improve biodiversity assessment in forest dynamics models by defining biodiversity linker functions (i.e. any algorithm or indicator that allows assessing an ecosystem service from forest dynamics model outputs; Blattert et al. 2017) at the landscape scale that integrate disturbance effects;
• assess the influence of structural complexity on ecosystem services and the value of complexity-based management strategies;
• synthesize evidence-based recommendations for enhancing resilience through adaptive management strategies targeting practice and policy decision makers.

This is a great opportunity to update the EFI disturbance database originally developed by Mart-Jan Schelhaas with the Forest Resources and Information Programme at EFI (early 2000s). For more information contact Marcus.

Using forest simulation models integrating disturbance, management and climate change, I-Maestro will address the following hypotheses: 1- forest management influences recovery processes after disturbance with high impacts on wood production and other ecosystem services; 2- enhancing structural complexity at the stand scprocesses related to growth reactivity (e.g. advance regeneration, response diversity of species); 3- structural complexity at the landscape scale will mitigate disturbance effects by diversifying resilience pathways and modulating stand susceptibility; 4- the optimal grain size for managing ecosystem services trade-offs depends on disturbance characteristics (e.g. size, frequency) and this should be considered in adopting local management strategies.ale leads to higher resilience of ecosystem services by favoring