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Research article2012Peer reviewed

Implications of growth uncertainties associated with climate change for stand management

Eriksson Ljusk, Ola; backeus, sofia; garcia, frederick

Abstract

Climate change is expected to have substantial effects on many aspects of forest ecosystems, including timber production. Temperatures in northern Europe are expected to increase considerably, although there is substantial uncertainty about both the seasonal and average changes that will occur. In Scandinavia, production is predicted to increase across most of the area covered by boreal forest, since the growth of trees in the region is currently limited by temperature. Therefore, we have analyzed the importance of adapting management practices to future climate changes and considered possible ways to address associated stand management problems. For this purpose, we simulated climate scenarios with temperature increases ranging from 2.5 to 6.0A degrees C over a 100-year period, and effects on typical Swedish stands with several species, then optimized their management with simulated annealing. The results indicate that the maximum considered temperature trend would raise the economic value of the stands by almost 5% more than the minimum trend. However, the importance of optimizing management plans in accordance with the correct temperature scenario appears to be limited. The plan optimized for the minimum temperature trend was only marginally inferior to the plan optimized for the maximum temperature trend in the maximum trend scenario, and vice versa. It also seemed adequate to use a deterministic formulation of the problem, and in cases where a stochastic climate change model generated more robust plans, the advantage could be attributed to model artifacts rather than climate change per se.

Keywords

Climate change; Forest management planning; Simulated annealing; Uncertainty

Published in

European Journal of Forest Research
2012, Volume: 131, number: 4, pages: 1199-1209 Publisher: SPRINGER

      SLU Authors

      Sustainable Development Goals

      SDG13 Climate action

      UKÄ Subject classification

      Forest Science

      Publication identifier

      DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10342-011-0591-4

      Permanent link to this page (URI)

      https://res.slu.se/id/publ/41991