Abstract
Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) has become an important pillar of modern forest management, and one way to evaluate the sustainability of forestry is to assess long-term supply of ecosystem services (ESs) indicators. The concept of sustainability also has come to include adapting to climate change and the associated dynamic timber markets. This study aims to: 1) incorporate several ESs indicators in a Forest Management Decision Support System (FMDSS) that can deal with climate change and dynamic timber markets; and 2) analyse the impact that intensified forest management, resulting from global change scenarios that represent different levels of climate change mitigation efforts, will have on forest ES indicators in the west of Ireland. A linear programming model that optimized Net Present Value (NPV) from mill-gate sales was previously developed in Remsoft Woodstock, a DSS framework used for strategic forest planning around the world. This Woodstock model was modified to include the effects of global scenarios that include climate change and dynamic timber prices. This model was further developed to include indicators for five ESs (carbon storage in the forest as well as in harvested wood products and carbon substitution, windthrow risk, biodiversity, water quality, and cultural values), to assess the impacts of these global scenarios on the forest landscape and the sustainability of forest management. The ES indicator values were mainly linked to forest age, forest type, and yield tables, and their inclusion in the FMDSS had almost no impact on total model run times. Intensified forest clearfelling, as a result of increasing timber prices associated with most global scenarios, led to increased phosphor emissions to waterbodies, and reductions in windthrow risk and carbon storage. The global scenarios only resulted in minor differences in the indicator values for biodiversity and cultural values. Besides the global scenarios, recent forest policy development and the poor soil conditions in the study area impacted on the results. The developed system, with its innovative method to incorporate climate change and associated market dynamics, could be applied to other forest landscapes in Ireland and Europe, or indeed by any forest company or organisation that uses Remsoft Woodstock.
Highlights
The concept of sustainable forestry originates from the 18th century and concerned sustainable supply of charcoal required for the mining industry (Hofer, 2009)
The aims of this study were: (1) incorporate several Ecosystem Services (ESs) indicators in a Forest Management Decision Support System (FMDSS) that can deal with climate change and dynamic timber markets; and (2) analyse the impact that intensified forest management, resulting from global change scenarios that represent different levels of climate change mitigation efforts, will have on forest ES indicators in the west of Ireland
The main change in forest composition over the planning horizon was the replacement of Sitka spruce and other conifer stands with lodgepole pine on blanket peat sites (Figure 2)
Summary
The concept of sustainable forestry originates from the 18th century and concerned sustainable supply of charcoal required for the mining industry (Hofer, 2009). The concept has since been expanded, and ES indicators specific to each region are utilised to assess the status of the forest and the economic, environmental and social performance of the forest industry. Quantifying ESs makes it possible to analyse the interactions and trade-offs between them under different forest management approaches (Raudsepp-Hearne et al, 2010). This can be done using Forest Management Decision Support Systems (FMDSSs), both at a stand and landscape level, which can be upscaled (or modelled) to analyse regional or even global level ES trade-offs
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