Forest management planning technology issues posed by climate change

Abstract

Given the widespread attention paid to global climate change over the last decade or so, a potential need has arisen to develop forest management plans for broad areas that address vulnerabilities and complexities in the environment with respect to potential changes in air temperature and precipitation patterns. These planning issues include recognizing potential range shifts in forest vegetation, changes in land uses, and changes in the growth and yield of forest tree species, particularly along the leading or trailing edges of the shifting ranges. In addition to assessing traditional forestry concerns (production, sustainability, fragmentation, and ecosystem health), planning processes will likely one day incorporate natural disturbance regimes and the impacts of invasive species. As these are often unpredictable events, planning processes will therefore probably have numerous stochastic processes that suggest the use of simulation models rather than the more popular deterministic mathematical programming models that are often used in forest planning today (e.g. linear programming). This review examines the changes that have occurred in forest planning since 2009, when a set of challenges facing forest planning, with respect to potential changes in the climate, were posed. We noted through a review of the literature that some areas of concern have received considerable attention of late (shifts in vegetation patterns, assessments of carbon sequestration, disaggregation of global climate model results), while other areas (e.g. natural disturbance modeling) have received less attention. These results relate directly to the use of concepts in forest planning rather than theoretical advancements along different lines of inquiry; therefore there may be some lag time involved in transitioning from theory to practice.