Developing and Implementing Climate Change Adaptation Options in Forest Ecosystems: A Case Study in Southwestern Oregon, USA

Halofsky, Jessica E.; Peterson, David L.; Metlen, Kerry L.; Myer, M. Gwyneth; Sample, V. Alaric

doi:10.3390/f7110268

Cited by 17 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 92 publications

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“…The future increase in fire will put late-successional forest at risk, potentially reducing habitat structures (large trees, snags, downed wood) that are important for many plant and animal species. In dry forests, some structures can be protected from fire by thinning around them and reducing organic material at their base (Halofsky et al 2016). To increase habitat quality and connectivity, increasing the density of these structures may be particularly effective in younger forests, especially where young forests are in close proximity to late-successional forest.…”

Section: Management Actionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing wildfire, changing forests: the effects of climate change on fire regimes and vegetation in the Pacific Northwest, USA

2020

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Background: Wildfires in the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and western Montana, USA) have been immense in recent years, capturing the attention of resource managers, fire scientists, and the general public. This paper synthesizes understanding of the potential effects of changing climate and fire regimes on Pacific Northwest forests, including effects on disturbance and stress interactions, forest structure and composition, and post-fire ecological processes. We frame this information in a risk assessment context, and conclude with management implications and future research needs. Results: Large and severe fires in the Pacific Northwest are associated with warm and dry conditions, and such conditions will likely occur with increasing frequency in a warming climate. According to projections based on historical records, current trends, and simulation modeling, protracted warmer and drier conditions will drive lower fuel moisture and longer fire seasons in the future, likely increasing the frequency and extent of fires compared to the twentieth century. Interactions between fire and other disturbances, such as drought and insect outbreaks, are likely to be the primary drivers of ecosystem change in a warming climate. Reburns are also likely to occur more frequently with warming and drought, with potential effects on tree regeneration and species composition. Hotter, drier sites may be particularly at risk for regeneration failures. Conclusion: Resource managers will likely be unable to affect the total area burned by fire, as this trend is driven strongly by climate. However, fuel treatments, when implemented in a spatially strategic manner, can help to decrease fire intensity and severity and improve forest resilience to fire, insects, and drought. Where fuel treatments are less effective (wetter, high-elevation, and coastal forests), managers may consider implementing fuel breaks around high-value resources. When and where post-fire planting is an option, planting different genetic stock than has been used in the past may increase seedling survival. Planting seedlings on cooler, wetter microsites may also help to increase survival. In the driest topographic locations, managers may need to consider where they will try to forestall change and where they will allow conversions to vegetation other than what is currently dominant.

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Section: Management Actionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changing wildfire, changing forests: the effects of climate change on fire regimes and vegetation in the Pacific Northwest, USA

2020

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“…These approaches reflect notions that nowadays silviculture and forest management should account not only for ecological, economic and social issues, but also promote forest resilience to climate change, while maintaining the whole forestry value chain. For instance, in North America, a number of adaptation frameworks, built upon on science-management partnerships, have currently been implemented on-the-ground by the Canadian and US forest agencies to identify optimum combination of already-existent measures to prepare forests to climate change (e.g., Halofsky et al 2016;Nagel et al 2017); for a review, see Halofsky et al (2018). In Europe, Climate Smart Forestry, a similar concept to the Climate-Smart Agriculture concept developed by FAO, has been suggested to safeguard the mitigation potential of forests against climate change through an array of regionally tailored measures (Nabuurs et al 2017).…”

Section: A Variety Of Approaches For a Variety Of Objectivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The functional complex network approach to foster forest resilience to global changes

et al. 2019

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Human impacts on Earth's ecosystems have greatly intensified in the last decades. This is reflected in unexpected disturbance events, as well as new and increasing socio-economic demands, all of which are affecting the resilience of forest ecosystems worldwide and the provision of important ecosystem services. This Anthropocene era is forcing us to reconsider past and current forest management and silvicultural practices, and search for new ones that are more flexible and better at dealing with the increasing uncertainty brought about by these accelerating and cumulative global changes. Here, we briefly review the focus and limitations of past and current forest management and silvicultural practices mainly as developed in Europe and North America. We then discuss some recent promising concepts, such as managing forests as complex adaptive systems, and approaches based on resilience, functional diversity, assisted migration and multi-species plantations, to propose a novel approach to integrate the functionality of species-traits into a functional complex network approach as a flexible and multi-scale way to manage forests for the Anthropocene. This approach takes into consideration the high level of uncertainty associated with future environmental and societal changes. It relies on the quantification and dynamic monitoring of functional diversity and complex network indices to manage forests as a functional complex network. Using this novel approach, the most efficient forest management and silvicultural practices can be determined, as well as where, at what scale, and at what intensity landscape-scale resistance, resilience and adaptive capacity of forests to global changes can be improved.

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“…Some tree species of special importance, such as Alaska yellow-cedar (Callitropsis nootkatensis), which is an important source of tribal weaving materials, appears highly vulnerable to climate change within its range (Coops and Waring 2011). However, other species highly valued by tribes, including California black oak (Quercus kelloggii), Oregon white oak (Quercus garryana), and tanoak (Notholithocarpus densiflorus) may even increase with warming climate despite the threat of increased wildfires (Halofsky et al 2016). Severe burns may help valued hardwoods, which can resprout, over their conifer competitors (Cocking et al 2014).…”

Section: Decline In Resource Quality and Quantity Leaving Areas No Lmentioning

confidence: 99%

Escaping social-ecological traps through tribal stewardship on national forest lands in the Pacific Northwest, United States of America

Long¹,

Lake²

2018

E&S

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ABSTRACT. Tribal communities in the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America (USA) have long-standing relationships to ancestral lands now managed by federal land management agencies. In recent decades, federal and state governments have increasingly recognized tribal rights to resources on public lands and to participate in their management. In support of a new planning initiative to promote sustainable land management, we reviewed scientific publications to examine relationships between tribal social-ecological systems and public lands in the region. We identified key ecocultural resources, impacts to those resources, and associated forest ecosystems, and strategies that have been piloted to redress those impacts. We found that many factors stemming from colonization by Euro-Americans have engendered social-ecological traps that have inhibited tribes from continuing traditional land stewardship activities that supported their well-being and maintained ecological integrity. These long-standing factors include legal and political constraints on tribal access and management; declining quality and abundance of forest resources due to inhibition of both natural disturbance and indigenous tending regimes; competition with nontribal users; species extirpations and introductions of invasive species; and erosion of tribal traditional ecological knowledge and relationships that are important for revitalizing resource use. As a consequence, both supply and demand for these forest resources have been reduced, as have the resilience and diversity of these ecosystems. Simply permitting resource harvest by tribal members does not sufficiently address the underlying constraints in ways that will promote tribal well-being. Escaping these traps will require addressing a gamut of ecological and social constraints through cooperative restoration efforts between land management agencies and tribes, several of which we highlight as examples. Because tribally focused restoration strategies generally align with broader strategies suggested to restore national forests in the region, they can foster both tribal well-being and ecological sustainability.

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Developing and Implementing Climate Change Adaptation Options in Forest Ecosystems: A Case Study in Southwestern Oregon, USA

Cited by 17 publications

References 92 publications

Changing wildfire, changing forests: the effects of climate change on fire regimes and vegetation in the Pacific Northwest, USA

Changing wildfire, changing forests: the effects of climate change on fire regimes and vegetation in the Pacific Northwest, USA

The functional complex network approach to foster forest resilience to global changes

Escaping social-ecological traps through tribal stewardship on national forest lands in the Pacific Northwest, United States of America

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