Balancing forest profitability and deadwood maintenance in European commercial forests: a robust optimization approach

Abstract

This study seeks to include two central aspects of forest management into an optimized forest planning model for commercial European forests: (i) the uncertainty related to climate change and forest responses to new environmental conditions and (ii) the maintenance of deadwood on forest stands, essential for sustaining biodiversity and promoting forest resilience. We analyzed forest outcomes of alternative management regimes generated by the process-based model 4C, considering four climate change scenarios. We evaluated the impacts on forest economy caused by an increasing amount of deadwood biomass left on forest stands, applying a deterministic and a robust forest planning model. Our results show that areas with high growth rates and low wood prices display the lowest trade-off between profitability and deadwood maintenance, whereas regions with high wood prices display high opportunity costs for maintaining large amounts of deadwood. Moreover, selecting robust management regimes caused minor impacts on the NPV, with an average reduction of 7% compared to the deterministic optimal solutions, appearing as a suitable alternative for integrating climate uncertainty into forest management planning.