Abstract
In this review and synthesis paper, we review the resilience of secondary forests to climate change through the lenses of ecosystem legacies and landscape diversity. Ecosystem legacy of secondary forests was categorized as continuous forest, non-continuous forest, reassembled after conversion to other land uses, and novel reassembled forests of non-native species. Landscape diversity, including landforms that create varied local climatic and soil conditions, can buffer changing climate to some extent by allowing species from warmer climates to exist on warm microsites, while also providing refugial locations for species that grow in cool climates. We present five frames that allow forest managers to visualize a trajectory of change in the context of projected regional climate change, which are: Frame 1 (persistence), keep the same dominant tree species with little change; Frame 2 (moderate change), keep the same tree species with large changes in relative abundance; Frame 3 (forest biome change), major turnover in dominant tree species to a different forest biome; Frame 4 (forest loss), change from a forest to a non-forest biome; and Frame 5 (planted novel ecosystem), establish a novel ecosystem to maintain forest. These frames interact with ecosystem legacies and landscape diversity to determine levels of ecosystem resilience in a changing climate. Although forest readiness to adapt to Frame 1 and 2 scenarios, which would occur with reduced greenhouse gas emissions, is high, a business as usual climate change scenario would likely overwhelm the capacity of ecosystem legacies to buffer forest response, so that many forests would change to warmer forest biomes or non-forested biomes. Furthermore, the interactions among frames, legacies, and landscape diversity influence the transient dynamics of forest change; only Frame 1 leads to stable endpoints, while the other frames would have transient dynamics of change for the remainder of the 21st century.
Highlights
Major impacts of climate change pose significant issues for adaptation of forests and appropriate management responses
To understand the interaction between management and forest adaptation to climate change, a brief review is needed of resilience [1], resilience debt [2], and ecosystem legacy and related concepts, including information and material legacies, ecological memory, and legacy syndrome [3,4]
We present a framework for managers to evaluate the potential response of a given forest to changing but uncertain future conditions, focusing on secondary forests and the development of novel conditions under climate change
Summary
Major impacts of climate change pose significant issues for adaptation of forests and appropriate management responses. Forest adaptation via management may be feasible or not, depending principally on the interactions between ecosystem legacies lending natural adaptability to forests, which may be enhanced or reduced by management actions, and the magnitude of climate change expected on a given landscape. For cases of low magnitudes of climate change, sufficient levels of ecosystem legacies and high ecological resilience, minimal management may be needed to allow forests to resist change (i.e., resistance). At some magnitude of change, no adaptation of the existing forest is possible (e.g., a transition to a completely different forest type or forest to non-forest) In such cases, managing for facilitation of the change and a graceful transition may be the best course of action. The overall objective of this paper is to illuminate the responses and resilience of forests to different magnitudes of climate change and their interactions with ecosystem legacies, and landscape diversity. We clarify our usage of several concepts and terms in widespread use
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