Forestry under Climate Change. Is Time a Tool for Sustainable Forest Management?

Abstract

Changing climate conditions are known to influence forest tree growth response and the CO2 cycle. Dendroclimatological research has shown that the climate signal, species composition, and growth trends have changed in different types of forest ecosystems during the last century. Under current and demonstrated changes in climate variability at the geographic, regional, and local levels tree growth shows also variability and trends that can be non-stationary during time even at relatively short distance between sites. In forest planning and management, yield tables, site quality indices, age class, rate of growth, and spatial distribution are some of the most used tools and parameters. However, these methods do not involve climate variability during time although climate is the main driver in trends of forest and tree growth. Previous research warns about the risk that forest management under changing climatic conditions could amplify their negative effects. For example, changing climate conditions may impact on temperature and/or precipitation thresholds critical to forest tree growth. Forest biomass, resilience, and CO2 storage may be damaged unless forest planning and management implement the relationships between climate variability and trends of tree growth. A positive aspect is that, periods of favorable climate conditions may allow harvesting higher amount of wood mass and storing more CO2 than traditional planning methods. And, the average length of both favorable and adverse periods appears to occur within the validity period of a forest management plan. Here, we show a conceptual development to implement climate variability in forest management in the view of continuing the research.

Robotic monitoring of forests: a dataset from the EU habitat 9210* in the Tuscan Apennines (central Italy)

“…In particular, we studied habitat “9210(*) Apennine beech forests with Taxus and Ilex ”, listed as of priority interest for conservation in the Annex I of the EU Habitats Directive. Anthropic pressures such as the intensification of sylvicultural management and climate change with increasing temperatures and drought are threatening the maintenance of such forests in a good conservation status in central Apennines 7 – 10 , as required by the Directive 92/43/EEC. For such reasons, there is the need to develop new and repeatable monitoring strategies that take account of the many indicators of the conservation status and naturalness of beech forests, such as their floristic composition, structural features like the dimensions of trees and the amount of dead wood, and the amount of litter, mosses, and lichens 5 .…”

Adaptive Forest Management under Climate Change: Some Adaption Criteria for Practical Purposes

“…Forest research has shown that climate variability plays a relevant role in forest planning and management under climate change [4,18,69] as it influences the response(s) of forest and tree growth and the CO2 cycle. Changing climate conditions can alter the temperature and/or precipitation thresholds critical to forest tree growth.…”

“…Periods of increase and decrease of stand growth crossed with a suitable range of temperature and/or rainfall thresholds for tree growth can identify time and period suitable for silvicultural interventions in forest planning and management. Source: [4].…”

“…Efforts have been made to develop forest growth and yield models to forecast tree growth under current and future climatic changing conditions [1,2,3]. However, these methods do not implement the variability in trends of climate variables over time, although climate is the main driver in trends of forest and tree growth [4]. The risk that forest management under climate change conditions amplifies their negative effects is not negligible.…”

Forest stand biomass of Picea spp.: an additive model that may be related to climate and civilisational changes

“…Temperature and precipitation are the most informative climatic factors that determine not only the radial annual growth of tree stems, but also the biological productivity of forest stands (DeLucia et al, 2000;Ni et al, 2001;Stegen et al, 2011;D' Aprile et al, 2015;Fang et al, 2016). Analysis of the results of such studies revealed significant contradictions and uncertainties about the assessment of these indices' dependence on temperature and precipitation using both empirical and functional models (Eggers et al, 2008;Shuman, Shugart, 2009;Poudel et al, 2011;Han et al, 2018).…”