Abstract

Resilient ecosystems provide natural insurance value, or resilience value, to the landowner and to society at large. In response to global calls for integrating biodiversity in sector policy and planning, we analysed the specified resilience value by simulating three storm regimes and five management scenarios: Business As Usual/BAU (spruce-dominance), Spruce Monoculture, More Broadleaves, Continuous Cover Forestry (CCF), and No Thinnings. The forest decision support system Heureka RegWise was used to simulate the effects of storms on forest dynamics and Net Present Value (NPV). No Thinnings, CCF and More Broadleaves were more resilient to storms (reduced damage cost) compared to BAU. BAU had the highest NPV only if storms are ignored, a common assumption in today's forest planning. Given storms, No Thinnings maximises NPV on landscape level. On the 20% most vulnerable plots the NPV was much higher for No Thinnings and slightly higher for CCF and More Broadleaves, compared to BAU. CCF and More Broadleaves also provide nature-based solutions (co-benefits) including public goods. However, forestry adaptations to storms are slow in Sweden, in contrast to e.g. German state forestry which emphasises maximising tree growth and resilience to several stresses and disturbances rather than NPV optimisation.

Keywords

Insurance value of ecosystems; insurance value of biodiversity; ecosystem services; ecosystem resilience; social-ecological systems; forest adaptations; mixed forests

Published in

Scandinavian Journal of Forest Research
2021, Volume: 36, number: 7-8, pages: 585-597
Publisher: TAYLOR AND FRANCIS AS

SLU Authors

• Eggers, Jeannette

  • Department of Forest Resource Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

• Subramanian, Narayanan

  • Southern Swedish Forest Research Centre, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

• Snäll, Tord

  • SLU Swedish Species Information Centre, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

Sustainable Development Goals

Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss
Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts


UKÄ Subject classification

Forest Science


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/02827581.2021.1988140

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/114290