Objetivo
Forest disturbance regimes have intensified distinctly in recent decades, and climate change is expected to further increase the frequency and severity of disturbance events. Adaptation is thus necessary to mitigate detrimental effects of this intensification on the sustainable provisioning of ecosystem services. However, while we’re beginning to understand the responses of individual disturbance agents to a changing climate, our knowledge on disturbance regimes (i.e. multiple agents interacting in space and time) is still limited. The development of adaptation strategies is further complicated by remaining deficiencies in our conception of forests as coupled human and natural systems. While forest models are increasingly able to simulate climate change impacts dynamically, human responses to these ecosystem changes are still widely represented as static prescriptions in such models, neglecting the adaptive capacity in silviculture. The here presented research agenda addresses these issues, with the overall aim to foster adaptation to changing climate and disturbance regimes in forest management. We will study wind – bark beetle interactions based on empirical data from long-term ecosystem research, and implement such interactions into a novel forest landscape simulator. We will furthermore develop an agent-based model of forest management within this simulation framework, with the ability to adapt management dynamically to the conditions emerging from the simulation. Harnessing these methodological advances in a number of case studies we will address questions such as whether interactions will amplify the climate sensitivity of disturbance regimes further, and how response diversity in multi-owner landscapes affects adaptive capacity. The project aims at improving the robustness of disturbance management and thus makes an important contribution to adapting sustainable forest management to changing climate and disturbance regimes.
Ámbito científico
Convocatoria de propuestas
FP7-PEOPLE-2012-CIG
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Régimen de financiación
MC-CIG - Support for training and career development of researcher (CIG)Coordinador
1180 Wien
Austria