Abstract
Forest development models have been used to predict future harvesting potentials and forest management reference levels under the Kyoto guidelines. This contribution aims at presenting the individual-tree simulator MASSIMO and demonstrating its scope of applications with simulations of two possible forest management reference levels (base or business as usual) in an example application. MASSIMO is a suitable tool to predict timber harvesting potentials and forest management reference levels to assess future carbon budgets of Swiss forests. While the current version of MASSIMO accurately accounts for legacy effects and management scenarios, effects of climate and nitrogen deposition on growth, mortality, and regeneration are not yet included. In addition to including climate sensitivity, the software may be further improved by including effects of species mixture on tree growth and assessing ecosystem service provision based on indicators.
Highlights
International commitments, such as the Paris agreement [1], require country-specific estimates of current and future carbon budgets, harvesting potentials, and forest management reference levels.The European Union proposed to establish those reference levels “transparently and in consideration of the business-as-usual procedures” compared to the period 1990–2009 [2]
We addressed the following questions: how do growing stock and harvesting potential develop under the base and business as usual management scenarios? What regional shifts of harvesting amounts must be expected when the current timber demand is harvested in the long-term?
As the time-step of the MASSIMO simulation is longer than the interval between NFI3 and NFI4 (10 years versus 3 to 9 years), the harvesting amount of the first simulation step was adjusted to meet growing stock of NFI4 data
Summary
International commitments, such as the Paris agreement [1], require country-specific estimates of current and future carbon budgets, harvesting potentials, and forest management reference levels.The European Union proposed to establish those reference levels “transparently and in consideration of the business-as-usual procedures” compared to the period 1990–2009 [2]. International commitments, such as the Paris agreement [1], require country-specific estimates of current and future carbon budgets, harvesting potentials, and forest management reference levels. Reliable estimates of the present state and the future development of forests shall be nationally representative for forest types, management interventions, and harvesting amounts. Many European countries develop their own systems to simulate current management practices [3], based on national forest inventories (NFI) and forest development models. Forest development models have been used to predict the state and changes of forest systems for a long time. Among the first were yield tables that were developed to predict the yield of pure even-aged stands on the basis of long-term observations from experimental forest plots [4,5]. An alternative approach offer ‘process-based’ models [5]. These models incorporate empirically- and/or theoretically-derived relationships on ecological and eco-physiological processes, such as competition, photosynthesis, Forests 2019, 10, 94; doi:10.3390/f10020094 www.mdpi.com/journal/forests
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