Optimizing management to enhance multifunctionality in a boreal forest landscape

Abstract

Summary1. The boreal biome, representing approximately one third of remaining global forests, provides a number of crucial ecosystem services. A particular challenge in forest ecosystems is to reconcile demand for increased timber production with provisioning of other ecosystem services and biodiversity. However, there is still little knowledge about how forest management could help solve this challenge. Hence, studies that investigate how to manage forests to reduce trade-offs between ecosystem services and biodiversity are urgently needed to help forest owners and policy-makers take informed decisions.2. We applied seven alternative forest management regimes using a forest growth simulator in a large boreal forest production landscape. First, we estimated the potential of the landscape to provide harvest revenues, store carbon and maintain biodiversity across a 50-year time period. Then, we applied multiobjective optimization to identify trade-offs between these three objectives, and to identify the optimal combination of forest management regimes to achieve these objectives.3. It was not possible to achieve high levels of either carbon storage or biodiversity if the objective of forest management was to maximize timber harvest revenues. Moreover, conflicts between biodiversity and carbon storage became stronger when simultaneously targeting high levels of timber revenues. However, with small reductions of timber revenues it was possible to greatly increase the multifunctionality of the landscape, especially the biodiversity indicators.4. Forest management actions, alternative to business-as-usual management, such as reducing thinnings, extending the rotation period and increasing the amount of area set-aside from forestry may be necessary to safeguard biodiversity and non-timber ecosystem services in Fennoscandia. Synthesis and applications.Our results show that no forest management regime alone is able to maximize timber revenues, carbon storage and biodiversity individually or simultaneously, and that a combination of different regimes is needed to resolve the conflicts among these objectives. We conclude that it is possible to reduce the trade-offs between different objectives by applying diversified forest management planning at the boreal landscape-level and that we need to give up the all-encompassing objective of very intensive timber production, which is prevailing particularly in Fennoscandian countries.

Carbon Pools in a Hemiboreal Over-Mature Norway Spruce Stands

“…Boreal forests are one of the biggest terrestrial carbon pools on Earth [2,3], storing carbon in the tree biomass and releasing it through decomposition, therefore playing a significant role in global climate change mitigation [4,5]. With increasing interest to promote carbon sequestration in forests, various new forest management practices are employed in managed even-aged stands [6][7][8][9] to meet the climate change targets and to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions in land use, land use change, and forestry (LULUCF) sector [1,10]. However, there is still a lack of reference studies of unmanaged over-mature forests [2].…”

“…According to the national forest inventory, Norway spruce forests constitute 20% of the forest standing volume in Latvia, also being one of the most economically important and intensively managed tree species [25]. As sustainable forest management is considered the most efficient way to increase the forest carbon stock [9,20], there is a growing need for reference data from unmanaged spruce stands. Therefore, the aim of this study was to quantify hemiboreal old unmanaged Norway spruce forests carbon stock in the main carbon pools: tree biomass, deadwood, and soil organic carbon.…”

Biodiversity and ecosystem services in forests: management and restoration founded on ecological theory

“…; Triviño et al . ). Our hope is that societies around the world can benefit from the wealth of such observational, experimental and theoretical works in forest ecosystems to help realize sustainable forest management.…”

Impacts of forestry on boreal forests: An ecosystem services perspective

“…This finding is supported by the extensive review by Abson et al (2014), who reported ecosystem service literature from forest ecosystems to be focused on tropical forests. Few, model-based studies have examined the effects of boreal forest management on ecosystem services (Miina et al 2010;Zanchi et al 2014;Triviño et al 2017), but the set of ecosystem services included also in these studies is limited compared to the wide range of benefits that boreal forests provide. It is clear that the existing literature, particularly literature building on the ecosystem services framework, does not yet cover the full range of boreal forestry's potential consequences for human benefits.…”

“…Kuuluvainen et al 2012) and care in the application of management activities to explicitly target multiple ecosystem services (e.g. Triviño et al 2017).Even though there is a long research tradition of linking forestry with ecosystem functioning, the terminology of ecosystem services has so far been used only marginally in the context of assessing the environmental impacts of boreal forestry. This is contrary to its common adoption in policy (e.g.…”