Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change: A National Experiment in Manager-Scientist Partnerships to Apply an Adaptation Framework

Abstract

Forest managers in the United States must respond to the need for climate-adaptive strategies in the face of observed and projected climatic changes. However, there is a lack of on-the-ground forest adaptation research to indicate what adaptation measures or tactics might be effective in preparing forest ecosystems to deal with climate change. Natural resource managers in many areas are also challenged by scant locally or regionally relevant information on climate projections and potential impacts. The Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC) project was designed to respond to these barriers to operationalizing climate adaptation strategies by providing a multiregion network of replicated operational-scale research sites testing ecosystem-specific climate change adaptation treatments across a gradient of adaptive approaches, and introducing conceptual tools and processes to integrate climate change considerations into management and silvicultural decisionmaking. Here we present the framework of the ASCC project, highlight the implementation process at two of the study sites, and discuss the contributions of this collaborative science-management partnership.

The functional complex network approach to foster forest resilience to global changes

“…These approaches reflect notions that nowadays silviculture and forest management should account not only for ecological, economic and social issues, but also promote forest resilience to climate change, while maintaining the whole forestry value chain. For instance, in North America, a number of adaptation frameworks, built upon on science-management partnerships, have currently been implemented on-the-ground by the Canadian and US forest agencies to identify optimum combination of already-existent measures to prepare forests to climate change (e.g., Halofsky et al 2016;Nagel et al 2017); for a review, see Halofsky et al (2018). In Europe, Climate Smart Forestry, a similar concept to the Climate-Smart Agriculture concept developed by FAO, has been suggested to safeguard the mitigation potential of forests against climate change through an array of regionally tailored measures (Nabuurs et al 2017).…”

Tree vulnerability to climate change: improving exposure‐based assessments using traits as indicators of sensitivity

“…) and of silviculture for adaptation (Nagel et al. ). Some interesting advances in ecological genetics (e.g., Nadeau et al.…”

“…Adaptive capacity -which covers a wide range of ecological, physiological, and genetic phenomena that dictate a species' ability to persist under changing environmental conditions-is currently the greatest uncertainty in vulnerability assessments (Chmura et al 2011, Hof et al 2011, Aubin et al 2016). Its inclusion is necessary to increase the accuracy of our vulnerability assessment, but also for the development of comprehensive adaptation strategies (Webster et al 2017) that incorporate the concepts of evolutionary resilience (Sgr o et al 2011) and of silviculture for adaptation (Nagel et al 2017). Some interesting advances in ecological genetics (e.g., Nadeau et al 2015b, Gallien et al 2016) and in functional ecology (e.g., Violle et al 2012, Sides et al 2014) and even more interestingly the intersection of these fields (e.g., Franks et al 2014, Prieto et al 2017) may provide the backbone of a way forward capturing adaptive capacity.…”

Anticipatory natural resource science and management for a changing future

“…These results can inform the structure of landscape-scale treatments designed to efficiently sustain ecosystem services. An excellent example is the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change (ASCC; www.forestadaptation.org/ascc) program, which is testing alternative forest treatment tactics, including assisted migration (Nagel et al 2017). Many adaptive management studies are motivated by long-term climate projections, whereas relatively few take advantage of short-or near-term ecoclimatological forecasts that will become increasingly reliable and accessible in the future.…”