A simulation model of functional habitat connectivity demonstrates the importance of species establishment in older forests

Jõks, Madli; Helm, Aveliina; Kasari‐Toussaint, Liis; Kook, Ene; Lutter, Reimo; Noreika, Norbertas; Oja, Ede; Öpik, Maarja; Randlane, Tiina; Reier, Ülle; Riibak, Kersti; Saag, Andres; Tullus, Hardi; Tullus, Tea; Pärtel, Meelis

doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2023.110361

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…At the same time, these areas become more isolated since such habitats will disappear in the surrounding production forests; this process is particularly clear for slightly younger (>80 years) forests that persisted until recently there (Fig 5). Biodiversity modeling suggests that the impact on old-forest species will be through impaired establishment into new areas [69], which appears only slowly. However, emerging climate change and disturbance pressures on population survival have not been estimated.…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling forest landscape futures: Full scale simulation of realistic socioeconomic scenarios in Estonia

Kaasik,

Kont,

Lõhmus

2023

PLoS ONE

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For political and administrative governance of land-use decisions, high-resolution and reliable spatial models are required over large areas and for various time horizons. We present a process-centered simulation model ‘NextStand’ (a forest landscape model, FLM) and its R-script, which predicts regional forest characteristics at a forest stand resolution. The model uses whole area stand data and is optimized for realistic iterative timber harvesting decisions, based on stand compositions (developing over time) and locations. We used the model for simulating spatial predictions of the Estonian forests in North Europe (2.3 Mha, about 2 M stands); the decisions were parameterized by land ownership, protection regimes, and rules of clear-cut harvesting. We illustrate the model application as a potential broad-scale Decision Support Tool by predicting how the forest age composition, placement of clear-cut areas, and connectivity of old stands will develop until the year 2050 under future scenarios. The country-scale outputs had a generally low within-scenario variance, which enabled to estimate some main land-use effects and uncertainties at small computing efforts. In forestry terms, we show that a continuation of recent intensive forest management trends will produce a decline of the national timber supplies in Estonia, which greatly varies among ownership types. In a conservation perspective, the current level of 13% forest area strictly protected can maintain an overall area of old forests by 2050, but their isolation is a problem for biodiversity conservation. The behavior of low-intensity forest management units (owners) and strict governance of clear-cut harvesting rules emerged as key questions for regional forest sustainability. Our study confirms that high-resolution modeling of future spatial composition of forest land is feasible when one can (i) delineate predictable spatial units of transformation (including management) and (ii) capture their variability of temporal change with simple ecological and socioeconomic (including human decision-making) variables.

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Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling forest landscape futures: Full scale simulation of realistic socioeconomic scenarios in Estonia

Kaasik,

Kont,

Lõhmus

2023

PLoS ONE

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“…Long term, spatially explicit land use and land cover (LULC) information is critical to several applications, such as analyses of landscape dynamics and effect of changing drivers (Abadie et (Hanski, 1999) as shown for e.g., forest (Bradshaw et al, 2015;Joks et al, 2023;Kaim et al, 2016), grassland (Horstmann et al, 2023;Noda et al, 2022, Scherreiks et al, 2022 and scrubland (Gamboa-Badilla et al, 2020) habitats. Furthermore, LULC history highly affects greenhouse gas emissions and storage (Fuchs et al, 2016;Nitch et al, 2018) and ecosystem service provision in general (Watson et al, 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing spatially explicit long-term landscape dynamics based on automated production of land category layers from Danish late 19th century topographic maps

Levin,

Groom,

Svenningsen

2024

Preprint

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Historical topographical maps contain valuable, spatially and thematically detailed information about past landscapes. Yet, for analyses of landscape dynamics through geographical information systems, it is necessary to "unlock" this information via map processing. For two study areas in northern and central Jutland, Denmark, we apply object-based image analysis, vector GIS, colour image segmentation and machine learning processes to produce machine readable layers for the land use and land cover categories forest, wetland, heath, dune sand and water bodies from topographic maps from the late 19th century. Obtained overall accuracy was beyond 90%. A comparison with a contemporary map revealed spatially explicit landscape dynamics dominated by transitions from heath and wetland to agriculture and forest and from heath and dune sand to forest. However, dune sand was also characterised by more complex transitions to heath and dry grassland, which can be related to active prevention of sand drift and due to natural succession but that can also be biased by different categorisations of dune sand between the historical and contemporary data. We conclude that automated production of machine-readable layers of land use and land cover categories from historical topographical maps offers a resource efficient alternative to manual vectorisation and is particularly useful for spatially explicit assessments of long-term landscape dynamics. Our results also underline that an understanding of mapped categories in both historical and contemporary maps is critical to the interpretation of landscape dynamics.

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Plants, fungi, and carabid beetles in temperate forests: both observed and dark diversity depend on habitat availability in space and time

Riibak,

Noreika,

Helm

et al. 2024

Landsc Ecol

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A simulation model of functional habitat connectivity demonstrates the importance of species establishment in older forests

Cited by 8 publications

References 55 publications

Modeling forest landscape futures: Full scale simulation of realistic socioeconomic scenarios in Estonia

Modeling forest landscape futures: Full scale simulation of realistic socioeconomic scenarios in Estonia

Assessing spatially explicit long-term landscape dynamics based on automated production of land category layers from Danish late 19th century topographic maps

Plants, fungi, and carabid beetles in temperate forests: both observed and dark diversity depend on habitat availability in space and time

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