Effects of forest conservation and management on volume growth, harvested amount of timber, carbon stock, and amount of deadwood in Finnish boreal forests under changing climate

Abstract

We employed a forest ecosystem model (SIMA) to study how the changes in forest conservation area and management affect the volume growth, harvested amount of timber, carbon stock, and amount of deadwood in Finnish boreal upland forests under current and changing climates (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) over 2010–2099. Simulations were carried out on National Forest Inventory plots using three different forest conservation scenarios (baseline and 10% and 20% increases of conservation area) and three thinning regimes (baseline and maintenance of ±20% stocking in thinning compared with recommendations). An increase of forest conservation area increased the volume growth, carbon stock, and quantity of deadwood in forests, as did the maintenance of 20% higher stocking in thinning. Maintenance of 20% lower stocking in thinning increased, in general, the amount of harvested timber, but it could not compensate for the decrease of harvested timber due to increase of conservation area. Climate warming greatly increased all of the studied variables in northern Finland but decreased them in southern Finland, the most under the strongest climate warming scenario, RCP8.5. Climate warming also increased the quantity of deadwood throughout Finland. To conclude, we found clear trade-offs for production of different ecosystem services.

Shifting from even-aged management to less intensive forestry in varying proportions of forest land in Finland: impacts on carbon storage, harvest removals, and harvesting costs

“…Peura et al (2018) assumed that alternative management was adopted over an entire landscape, which is not realistic in practice due to fragmented land ownership and, consequently, non-uniform management objectives across the landscape. In their simulations based on the Finnish NFI10 data, Alrahahleh et al (2016) increased the conservation area by 10% or 20%; when the sample plots used for conservation were selected in random (but with a probability related to basal area), sites not feasible or available for conservation may be emphasized, as reasoned above. In Solberg et al (2017), the allocation was solved by means of optimization.…”

“…Yet, the growth and harvesting simulations are based on the individual NFI plots, thereby facilitating a very detailed modelling of the transitions according to different forest types, for example. Therefore, the results of the simulations are less affected by ecosystem model assumptions (cf., Alrahahleh et al 2016) or optimized allocation of silvicultural treatments (cf., Hynynen et al 2015;Heinonen et al 2017Heinonen et al , 2018Solberg et al 2017). As demonstrated above, expert opinion on changes in activities or allocations can be added to the modelling framework, corresponding to future land-use-climate policies.…”

Effects of CMIP5 Projections on Volume Growth, Carbon Stock and Timber Yield in Managed Scots Pine, Norway Spruce and Silver Birch Stands under Southern and Northern Boreal Conditions

“…So far, most of the previous climate change impact studies, either at the stand or regional level, have in Finland been based on the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (e.g., SRES A1B, CMIP3), or other scenarios [2,[16][17][18][19][20]. Only a few recent impact studies have used either some multi-model mean climate projections of the CMIP5 database (e.g., [21,22]) or individual GCM projections as such (e.g., [23,24]), under different RCP forcing scenarios, to consider uncertainties related to climate change and its effects on forests and forestry. However, consideration of such uncertainties is crucial, since the growth responses of forests and consequent adaptive measures may be even opposite depending on the climate change projection used.…”

“…Forest ecosystem models offer also a means to study the responses of tree species to different forest management measures and climate change projections (see, e.g., [2,[17][18][19]25,26]). Understanding such responses is crucial in order to define sustainable management and utilization strategies of forest resources for changing operative environment, as large trade-offs may occur between the production of different ecosystem services [2,14,21,[26][27][28][29][30].…”

Effects of using certain tree species in forest regeneration on regional wind damage risks in Finnish boreal forests under different CMIP5 projections

“…This is needed in order to properly adapt forest management to climate change. The forest ecosystem models, together with up-to-date information on current forest resources, and different climate projections offer a means of predicting forest growth and dynamics under changing management regimes and environmental conditions, respectively (Garcia-Gonzalo et al 2007;Seidl and Lexer 2013;Alrahahleh et al 2017Alrahahleh et al , 2018Reyer et al 2017). The use of the simulated outputs of forest ecosystem models as inputs for mechanistic wind damage models also offers a means of predicting the threshold wind speeds needed for wind damage to forests and, consequently, their probabilities and the amount of damage to expect (Gardiner et al 2008;Peltola et al 2010;Seidl et al 2014;Ikonen et al 2017).…”