Integrating climate adaptation strategies in spatial decision support systems

Abstract

With the onset of rapid climate change and the legacy of past forest management and fire suppression policies, the capacity for forested landscapes to maintain core functionality and processes is being challenged. As such, managers are tasked with increasing the pace and scale of management to mitigate negative impacts of future large disturbances and improve resilience and climate adaptation of large landscapes. Such an effort will require consensus building, with partners and stakeholders to determine where to allocate scarce resources. We present a methodology to identify strategic (where to go) and tactical (what to do) priorities across large landscapes to assist in project level planning. The model integrates a spatial assessment of current ecological and resource conditions and spatial outputs from a landscape succession and disturbance simulation model (LANDIS-II) to assess the potential to achieve desired conditions under climate change with ongoing disturbances. Based on the expected trajectory of landscape conditions over time, the model applies multivalent reasoning (aka, fuzzy logic) to provide spatial decision support for four management strategies (Monitor, Protect, Adapt, and Transform) across the landscape. We apply these methods to a 970,000-ha landscape in the central Sierra Nevada Mountains of California with a focus on managing for improved carbon sequestration. By including future landscape conditions in the model, decisions made at the stand-level are inherently tied to and influenced by larger landscape-level processes that are likely to have the greatest influence on future landscape dynamics. Evaluations are adaptable to incorporating multiple metrics to capture the many resources management can influence such as forest resilience, fire dynamics, biodiversity conservation, and carbon sequestration. Model outputs could also be used as inputs into optimization models to assess tradeoffs and synergies between these conditions and resources, technical and economic feasibilities, and to develop long-term management plans.

Managing for biodiversity: The effects of climate, management and natural disturbance on wildlife species richness

“…Model outputs can be used to produce spatially explicit maps of vegetation types and conditions, seral stage, biomass, carbon, and disturbance frequency and intensity. In turn, these outputs can be used to make inferences about a wide array of values, including wildlife habitat, biodiversity, cultural and social benefits and impacts, economic costs, ecosystem services, and the socio‐ecological resilience across forested landscapes as a whole (Manley et al, in review; Povak et al, in review). Outputs can be used by managers to determine how disturbances are affecting wildlife habitat and biodiversity across a landscape over time, and how management can enhance wildlife habitat and biodiversity conservation.…”