How Sensitive Are Ecosystem Services in European Forest Landscapes to Silvicultural Treatment?

Abstract

While sustainable forestry in Europe is characterized by the provision of a multitude of forest ecosystem services, there exists no comprehensive study that scrutinizes their sensitivity to forest management on a pan-European scale, so far. We compile scenario runs from regionally tailored forest growth models and Decision Support Systems (DSS) from 20 case studies throughout Europe and analyze whether the ecosystem service provision depends on management intensity and other co-variables, comprising regional affiliation, social environment, and tree species composition. The simulation runs provide information about the case-specifically most important ecosystem services in terms of appropriate indicators. We found a strong positive correlation between management intensity and wood production, but only weak correlation with protective and socioeconomic forest functions. Interestingly, depending on the forest region, we found that biodiversity can react in both ways, positively and negatively, to increased management intensity. Thus, it may be in tradeoff or in synergy with wood production and forest resource maintenance. The covariables species composition and social environment are of punctual interest only, while the affiliation to a certain region often makes an important difference in terms of an ecosystem service's treatment sensitivity.

Do ecosystem services provide an added value compared to existing forest planning approaches in Central Europe?

“…Even at the local scale, the stakeholders recognized that the existence of synergies or trade-offs may depend on the actual management, e.g., silvicultural management or urban planning, which has been shown for regulating and provisioning ESS (Duncker et al 2012). However, in contrast to existing studies in forestry on abstract forest entities (Biber et al 2015), the spatial link should be considered to set the supply of forest functions or ESS into the context of local demand. One approach could be scenario development as in existing landscape-scale studies (Plieninger et al 2013b).…”

Decision Support Tools and Strategies to Simulate Forest Landscape Evolutions Integrating Forest Owner Behaviour: A Review from the Case Studies of the European Project, INTEGRAL

“…Detailed descriptions about the case studies are available in [9] and Table 1 provides basic information about these case study areas, such as: total area (from 600 to 697,000 ha), forest area (from 501 to 330,000 ha), number of tree species in the area (from 5 to 29) and main trees species names. Table 1.…”

“…Sustainability 2017, 9, 599 3 of 32 landscape simulation qualitatively [9] throughout the regions, this paper focuses on the modelling tools and datasets used during the INTEGRAL project to carry out simulations on a representative set of 20 European forest landscapes so that we can illustrate the strengths and limits of various approaches and tools available in Europe. It provides above all an overview of the characteristics of stand growth models and decision support tools that can be used for such landscape simulations and can explain the consequences of the choices in terms of portability from one region to the other.…”

“…An important part of the research was to identify each region's most relevant forest ecosystem service and to design and/or implement appropriate quantitative indicators for benchmarking ecosystem service provision in the forest growth scenarios using the most appropriate and up-to date growth models and decision support tools. Considering that the INTEGRAL project case studies cover a representative set of socio-economical and forest contexts in Europe [9], the project offers an excellent overview of all the technical options for carrying out such simulations that were available in 2015 throughout Europe. Rather than presenting the results of each case study [10][11][12][13], or comparing the results of the landscape simulation qualitatively [9] throughout the regions, this paper focuses on the modelling tools and datasets used during the INTEGRAL project to carry out simulations on a representative set of 20 European forest landscapes so that we can illustrate the strengths and limits of various approaches and tools available in Europe.…”

“…Considering that the INTEGRAL project case studies cover a representative set of socio-economical and forest contexts in Europe [9], the project offers an excellent overview of all the technical options for carrying out such simulations that were available in 2015 throughout Europe. Rather than presenting the results of each case study [10][11][12][13], or comparing the results of the landscape simulation qualitatively [9] throughout the regions, this paper focuses on the modelling tools and datasets used during the INTEGRAL project to carry out simulations on a representative set of 20 European forest landscapes so that we can illustrate the strengths and limits of various approaches and tools available in Europe. It provides above all an overview of the characteristics of stand growth models and decision support tools that can be used for such landscape simulations and can explain the consequences of the choices in terms of portability from one region to the other.…”