Adapting Forest Management to Climate Change
ForeMa is a Forest Management Decision Support Tool designed for forest management practitioners. It aims at assessing management practices and climate change impacts on multiple Ecosystem Services.
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About
The work related to the development of the tool was published in "Forests" journal, with the title Cristal et al. 2019, “A Decision Support Tool for Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on Multiple Ecosystem Services”
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The consept is quite simple: Users input stand information, climate change and management data. Then the embeded forest simulator computes the forest dynamics for a given horizon, and sends its outputs to the Ecosystem Services (ES) module. Biomass, Carbon, Standing timber, Mushroom Production, Scenic Beauty, Erosion and Fire Risk are the results of the ES module
Tutorial
The usage of the system can be summarized in five steps:
Input stand and climate data, Generate the management alternatives, run the simulations, and visualize the outputs
Create Stand: Stand Description
ForeMa DSS operates at a stand level, where each stand is fixed at a size of 1 ha. The attributes describing the stand, such as climate, geographic location, topography etc., should be given as input data for the simulation.
Create Stand: Trees distribution
The trees describe the current state of the stand. Trees are defined by their species and their Diameter at Breast Height (DBH) class distribution. Size classes are user defined and will be used to display the results a well. Trees data can be either loaded in a tab delimited format, or inserted manually in the corresponding interface.
Import Stand
Instead of manually input stand data, there is an option to upload multiple stands. A template, which can be found on the left upper corner, shows the exact structure of the file to be uploaded.
Import Stand File Template
Excel template has two sheets: stand description and trees description. Each record correspond to a stand, and has a forest id and a stand id.
Import Stand File Template
Trees are described by species and their density (number of trees) per Diameter at Breast Height (DBH) class.
Imported data
The imported data will appear in the Forema interface.
Trees distribution graphs
Once imported, data can be visualized as graphs showing the trees distribution.
Climate Change
Climate data used in the system are temperature and precipitation. Annual mean temperature and annual precipitation are required to run the simulation. To assess the climate change impact on the stand development, the simulation operates in two ways: either by using an exponential precipitation and temperature trend for the simulation horizon, or by importing future projections of monthly climate data directly.
Management Prescription
ForeMa DSS defines forest management alternatives in terms of number and intensity of thinnings. The basic attributes to be considered are: number of thinnings, thinning year (the year of simulation, not the age of the stand), amount to cut: number of trees, or percent of basal area to remove per each diameter class, type of thinning: from above or from below, and final cut for even-aged management.
Simulation
After defining the management alternatives, the system is ready to run the simulations. It can be done for one or multiple stands. The simulation interface allows to define which management alternatives to run, and the type of the outputs.
Simulation Overview
The simulation overview tab visualizes graphs foer number of trees, Basal Area, Biomass and other Ecosystem Services, per simulation year. If management was applied, then Harvest table will be populated with Timber Volume and Roadside price per thinning year. The alternatives can be compared in pairs, by loading two alternatives (ES.csv files) in the corresponding fields.
Simulation Detailed View
The detailed view draws the trees in a 2D arbitrary coordinate system. Additionally, trees distribution graph and Ecosystem Services values are provided per each simulated year. In addition to the 2D representation, it is possible to generate 3D scenes of the stand
Simulation 3D View
The simulation overview tab visualizes graphs foer number of trees, Basal Area, Biomass and other Ecosystem Services, per simulation year. If management was applied, then Harvest table will be populated with Timber Volume and Roadside price per thinning year. The alternatives can be compared in pairs, by loading two alternatives (ES.csv files) in the corresponding fields.
Downloads
Forema Desktop version is currently available for Widows OS under CC licence after request
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