Soil Organic Matter: A Sustainability Indicator for Wildfire Control and Bioenergy Production in the Urban/Forest Interface

Abstract

Many rural communities in British Columbia (western Canada) are increasingly at risk from wildfire as temperatures rise and droughts become more frequent. In addition, these communities are also faced with rising fuel costs, and a growing demand for heat as their populations increase. The fact these communities are surrounded by forests presents an opportunity to combine community wildfire risk abatement with bioenergy development. Here we show how the ecological model FORECAST was linked with GIS and economic models to create a freely available on-line tool (FIRST Heat) to help other communities make their own screening-level ecological assessments of combining wildfire risk control with district heating systems. The tool incorporates an ecological sustainability index based on the relative change in soil organic matter (SOM) after 50 years of management compared to initial levels. Two thresholds were defined: 10% SOM lost as "warning" level, and 20% SOM lost as "critical" level. The tool was able to adequately capture the influences of ecological zone, stand age, site quality, and intensity of forest management on SOM losses. Stands in the sub-boreal and arid interior were significantly more exposed to SOM losses than in other ecological zones, as well as soils in old-growth forests. Stands in poor sites were significantly more sensitive to forest management than young and fertile sites. All things considered, our results show the suitability of incorporating ecological models and SOM thresholds in user-friendly decision-support tools to successfully transfer scientific knowledge on forest soils to local stakeholders and decision makers.

Resilience Assessment of Lowland Plantations Using an Ecosystem Modeling Approach

“…On the contrary, the afforestation in the poor site helped to enhance the SOM pool, which was rather drastic in the two consecutive 100-year rotation sites with an increase up to 46% of the initial value (for the mixing scheme of 1200 camphor laurel-300 Himalayan ash trees ha ). This buildup of SOM in poor sites under mixed stands has been reported before for sub-boreal and temperate forests [13].…”

“…Forest ecosystems of high resilience should therefore be an important management goal, especially for the regions prone to frequent natural disturbances, like typhoons. Among other ecological indicators of the ecosystem state, soil organic matter (SOM) is an important nutrient pool that supports the regeneration of a stand after disturbances and, therefore, could serve as an indicator of system resilience [13].…”

“…Soil is the support of all vegetation growth, and therefore, a criterion for maintaining sustainability is keeping soil productivity stable in the long run [34], which then can be measured with two indicators: the amount of soil organic matter and available N [13,66]. Both variables are essential components of ecosystem resiliency [7,8].…”

Maintaining Ecosystem Function by Restoring Forest Biodiversity – Reviewing Decision-Support Tools that link Biology, Hydrology and Geochemistry

“…Some parameter values are universal and exhibit little variation; for others, the model is relatively insensitive to their variability (see [74], for a sensitivity analysis). Although FORECAST is a stand-alone model, it has been used for landscape-level analysis by linking it to GIS systems that classify the area under study into different ecosystem types [75,76]. One advantage with FORECAST is that it has already been used extensively in oil sands reclamation (12, and references therein), and so datasets have already been constructed for the dominant tree and understory species.…”

Simulating the interaction among initial stand density and water and nutrient flows to understand the development of Pinus sylvestris and Fagus sylvatica mixedwoods under climate change

“…Sin embargo, uno de los puntos a comprobar fue la capacidad del modelo para estimar la competencia por agua de las distintas especies que componen un bosque mixto. El modelo FORECAST, en su versión sin simulación explícita del ciclo hidrológico (Kimmins et al 1999), ha mostrado ser capaz de simular de forma aceptable las interac-ciones entre distintas especies de árboles que compiten en bosques mixtos por nutrientes y luz, tanto en ambientes boreales (Seely et al 2008), templados (Blanco et al 2014) y subtropicales (Wei y Blanco 2014, Wu et al 2015.…”