Challenges in Climate-Driven Decision Support Systems in Forestry

Abstract

The history of Decision Support Systems in forestry is quite long as well as the list of created systems and reviews summarizing their merits and flaws. It is generally recognized that a modern decision support system (DSS) should address simultaneously as many economical and ecological issues as possible without becoming overly complex and still remain understandable for users (Reynolds et al., 2008). The ongoing global change including the climate change sets new boundary conditions for decision makers in the forestry sector. The changing growth conditions (Albert & Schmidt, 2010) and expected increasing number of weather extremes like storms force forest owners to make decisions on how to replace the damaged stands and/or how to mitigate the damages. This decision making process requires adequate information on the future climate as well as on complex climate-forest interactions which could be provided by an appropriate climate-driven decision support tool. Both the damage factors and the forest management (e.g. harvesting) result in changes of the structure of forest stands. The structural changes result in immediate changes of albedo and roughness of land surface as well as of microclimatological conditions within the stand and on the soil surface. The consequences are manifold. The changed stand density and leaf area index trigger energy and water balance changes which in turn increase or decrease the vulnerability of the remaining stand to abiotic and biotic damage factors like droughts or insect attacks. A change of the microclimatic conditions might strengthen the forest against drought, but at the same time reduce its resistance to windthrow. The sign and extent of vulnerability changes depend on complex interactions of the effective climatic agents, aboveand belowground forest structure, and soil. There are many DSS that are capable of assessing one or several risk factors; however there are few that are able to assess the additional increase or decrease of risks triggered by modification of forest structure resulting from previous damage or forest management activities. Disregarding these effects will inevitably lead user to either underor overestimation of the potential damages. The question arises whether these additional risks are significant enough to be considered in a DSS. In this chapter we present a new DSS developed according to the above mentioned requirements and capable to provide decision support taking into account economical and ecological considerations under the conditions of changing climate the Decision Support