Forest management scenarios in a changing climate: trade‐offs between carbon, timber, and old forest

Abstract

Balancing economic, ecological, and social values has long been a challenge in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, where conflict over timber harvest and old-growth habitat on public lands has been contentious for the past several decades. The Northwest Forest Plan, adopted two decades ago to guide management on federal lands, is currently being revised as the region searches for a balance between sustainable timber yields and habitat for sensitive species. In addition, climate change imposes a high degree of uncertainty on future forest productivity, sustainability of timber harvest, wildfire risk, and species habitat. We evaluated the long-term, landscape-scale trade-offs among carbon (C) storage, timber yield, and old forest habitat given projected climate change and shifts in forest management policy across 2.1 million hectares of forests in the Oregon Coast Range. Projections highlight the divergence between private and public lands under business-as-usual forest management, where private industrial forests are heavily harvested and many public (especially federal) lands increase C and old forest over time but provide little timber. Three alternative management scenarios altering the amount and type of timber harvest show widely varying levels of ecosystem C and old-forest habitat. On federal lands, ecological forestry practices also allowed a simultaneous increase in old forest and natural early-seral habitat. The ecosystem C implications of shifts away from current practices were large, with current practices retaining up to 105 Tg more C than the alternative scenarios by the end of the century. Our results suggest climate change is likely to increase forest productivity by 30-41% and total ecosystem C storage by 11-15% over the next century as warmer winter temperatures allow greater forest productivity in cooler months. These gains in C storage are unlikely to be offset by wildfire under climate change, due to the legacy of management and effective fire suppression. Our scenarios of future conditions can inform policy makers, land managers, and the public about the potential effects of land management alternatives, climate change, and the trade-offs that are inherent to management and policy in the region.

The climate sensitivity of carbon, timber, and species richness covaries with forest age in boreal–temperate North America

“…Broad-scale scenario analyses have predicted negative effects of climate change on a number of services and biodiversity indicators (Sala, 2000;Schröter et al, 2005;Seidl, Schelhaas, Rammer, & Verkerk, 2014;Thomas et al, 2004;Thuiller et al, 2011). Yet, few studies have simultaneously estimated climate change impacts on multiple ESB indicators and quantified their associations (Creutzburg, Scheller, Lucash, LeDuc, & Johnson, 2017;Irauschek, Rammer, & Lexer, 2017). Moreover, the climate sensitivity of ESB may vary with structural and compositional changes induced by forest aging (Boulanger, Taylor, Price, Cyr, & Sainte-Marie, 2018;Pan et al, 2011).…”

“…Moreover, it is likely that climate change impacts will be spatially heterogeneous and nonlinear due to differences in climate, edaphic conditions, and competitive interactions among other factors (Creutzburg et al, 2017;Frey et al, 2016). The climate sensitivity of ESB may also covary with forest age and development.…”

Trade‐offs between temporal stability and level of forest ecosystem services provisioning under climate change

“…In the context of a comprehensive consideration of uncertainties in ecosystem service assessments (Runting et al 2017), it is of interest whether management strategies can be developed that simultaneously achieve high stability and a high level of ecosystem services provisioning. While many recent studies have investigated the role of forest management in providing multiple ecosystem services under climate change, as well as dealing with trade-offs between individual services (Temperli et al 2012, Creutzburg et al 2017, Mina et al 2017, the question of whether stability of ecosystem service provisioning comes at the expense of the level of service provisioning has, to our knowledge, not yet been investigated.…”

Shifting from even-aged management to less intensive forestry in varying proportions of forest land in Finland: impacts on carbon storage, harvest removals, and harvesting costs

“…Conventional models for forest development would, therefore, extrapolate outside the original population if applied in uneven-aged forests. Moreover, detailed forest-specific thinning instructions might not reconcile with large-area projections based on aggregated spatial scales (cf., Verkerk et al 2014;Creutzburg et al 2017;Mouchet et al 2017). As such, there is a need for flexible tools that can combine detailed instructions with projection capabilities for large areas.…”