Climate Analogues for Temperate European Forests to Raise Silvicultural Evidence Using Twin Regions

Tobias Mette,Susanne Brandl,Christian Kölling

doi:10.3390/su13126522

Tobias Mette, Susanne Brandl + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13126522

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Abstract

Climate analogues provide forestry practice with empirical evidence of how forests are managed in “twin” regions, i.e., regions where the current climate is comparable to the expected future climate at a site of interest. As the twin regions and their silvicultural evidence change with each climate scenario and model, we focus our investigation on how the uncertainty in future climate affects tree species prevalence. We calculate the future climate from 2000 to 2100 for three ensemble variants of the mild (representative concentration pathway (RCP) 4.5) and hard (RCP 8.5) climate scenarios. We determine climatic distances between the future climate of our site of interest ‘Roth’ and the current climate in Europe, generating maps with twin regions from 2000 to 2100. From forest inventories in these twin regions we trace how the prevalence of 23 major tree species changes. We realize that it is not the ‘how’ but the ‘how fast’ species’ prevalence changes that differs between the scenario variants. We use this finding to develop a categorization of species groups that integrates the uncertainty in future climate. Twin regions provide further information on silvicultural practices, pest management, product chains etc.

Highlights

Climate change is a major threat to European forests [1,2]
The current climate serves as a reference in two ways: (a) as the climate where we look for twin regions of the projected future climate of a site, (b) as the reference climate which we use for a local adjustment of the climate models
To find a normalization that reflects the tree species’ sensitivity to our three climate parameters we evaluated species distribution models of 33 tree species in Europe (Mette, unpublished)

Summary

Introduction

Climate change is a major threat to European forests [1,2]. Climate models predict temperature to rise another 0.9–3.5 ◦ C until 2100 (climate models in Table 1 for Europe). While for Northern Europe temperature will continue to rise drastically, for Southern Europe a further reduction of summer precipitation will probably have more severe consequences [1,4]. Forests react to climate change not gradually but rather suddenly in response to climatic extremes [5,6]. A series of three exceptionally dry summers has led to a widespread forest dieback in Middle Europe [7,8]. The dieback affected boreal tree species Norway spruce and Scots pine and temperate tree species like European beech and others [9,10,11]. Forest owners and society are startled—is this the beginning of the extirpation of our forests? How could it come that far? Where will it lead us?

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Discussion

Conclusion