Suchergebnisse

Europe's bioeconomy policy seeks to diversify the energy sources for industrial purposes through the gradual replacement of fossil fuels by the sustainable use of renewable biological resources (e.g. forest products), and therefore, to contribute to the mitigation of ongoing climate change. Sustainable harvesting levels of forest biomass to meet future demands of bioenergy and wood-based products need to be carefully evaluated, in order to minimize the potential negative impacts of forest exploitation/use on forest ecosystem functioning (and services provisioning) and on their associated biodiversity values. In this study we explore the effects of three European-level bioeconomy scenarios on the coverage of Mediterranean forests, their spatial distribution, and the fire regime (fire frequency and fire size) in Catalonia, a Mediterranean fire-prone region currently dominated by an agro-forest mosaic. The 'Business-as-usual' scenario assumes that no new bioeconomy policies are implemented, the 'EU bioenergy' scenario aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in EU28 by increasing bioenergy production, and the 'Global bioeconomy' scenario seeks to enhance a full development of bioeconomy based on bioenergy and the use of biomaterials. We first downscaled to the study region the outputs of GLOBIOM model, a global market equilibrium model that analyzes the competition for land use between the agriculture, forestry, and bioenergy sectors. It generates national-level demands for industrial roundwood and biomass for energy production. We link the outputs of the GLOBIOM to the MEDFIRE model. The MEDFIRE is a regional spatially explicit landscape dynamic model that accounts for vegetation growth, drought-induced mortality, establishment after fire, and afforestation. It incorporates a forest management and land-use change module, and also simulates fire behaviour and fire suppression actions. The combination of the two models allow us to obtain future spatially explicit projections of the Mediterranean forests distribution and coverage on an annual basis from 2010 to 2100, under each bioeconomy scenario. Results show that fire regime is progressively altered, both fire frequency and fire size will increase, in both bioenergy based scenarios due to a positive feedback between more fuel load availability and more severe climate. However, an increase on fire incidence reshape forest structure and compromise future wood demand to meet the bioenergy policies. Scenario projections will be further used to evaluate the potential impacts of each bioeconomy scenario on the provision of ecosystem services linked to Mediterranean forests, as well as their potential effects on biodiversity values. The work presented here is part of the Sumforest project FutureBioEcon. ; peerReviewed

Available data show that future changes in global change drivers may lead to an increasing impact of fires on terrestrial ecosystems worldwide. Yet, fire regime changes in highly humanised fire-prone regions are difficult to predict because fire effects may be heavily mediated by human activities We investigated the role of fire suppression strategies in synergy with climate change on the resulting fire regimes in Catalonia (north-eastern Spain). We used a spatially-explicit fire-succession model at the landscape level to test whether the use of different firefighting opportunities related to observed reductions in fire spread rates and effective fire sizes, and hence changes in the fire regime. We calibrated this model with data from a period with weak firefighting and later assess the potential for suppression strategies to modify fire regimes expected under different levels of climate change. When comparing simulations with observed fire statistics from an eleven-year period with firefighting strategies in place, our results showed that, at least in two of the three sub-regions analysed, the observed fire regime could not be reproduced unless taking into account the effects of fire suppression. Fire regime descriptors were highly dependent on climate change scenarios, with a general trend, under baseline scenarios without fire suppression, to large-scale increases in area burnt. Fire suppression strategies had a strong capacity to compensate for climate change effects. However, strong active fire suppression was necessary to accomplish such compensation, while more opportunistic fire suppression strategies derived from recent fire history only had a variable, but generally weak, potential for compensation of enhanced fire impacts under climate change. The concept of fire regime in the Mediterranean is probably better interpreted as a highly dynamic process in which the main determinants of fire are rapidly modified by changes in landscape, climate and socioeconomic factors such as fire suppression strategies. ; This study has received financial support from the projects CGL2008-05506-C02-01/BOS, CGL2011-29539/BOS and Consolider Montes CSD2008-00040 granted by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (MEC). Additional funding to LB and MC was received from the Catalan government through projects 2010 BE 272 and the 'Beatriu de Pinós' Programme (2009 BP-B 00342).

AbstractAlong with forest managers, builders are key change agents of forest ecosystems' structure and composition through the specification and use of wood products. New forest management approaches are being advocated to increase the resilience and adaptability of forests to climate change and other natural disturbances. Such approaches call for a diversification of our forests based on species' functional traits that will dramatically change the harvested species composition, volume, and output of our forested landscapes. This calls for the wood-building industry to adapt its ways of operating. Accordingly, we expand the evaluation of the ecological resilience of forest ecosystems based on functional diversification to include a trait-based approach to building with wood. This trait-based plant-building framework can illustrate how forecasted forest changes in the coming decades may impact and guide decisions about wood-building practices, policies, and specifications. We apply this approach using a fragmented rural landscape in temperate southeastern Canada. We link seven functional groups based on the ecological traits of tree species in the region to a similar functional grouping of building traits to characterize the push and pull of managing forests and wood buildings together. We relied on a process-based forest landscape model to simulate long-term forest dynamics and timber harvesting to evaluate how various novel management approaches will interact with the changing global environment to affect the forest-building relationships. Our results suggest that adopting a whole system, plant-building approach to forests and wood buildings, is key to enhancing forest ecological and timber construction industry resilience.

Fire has been a source of global biodiversity for millions of years. However, interactions with anthropogenic drivers such as climate change, land use, and invasive species are changing the nature of fire activity and its impacts. We review how such changes are threatening species with extinction and transforming terrestrial ecosystems. Conservation of Earth's biological diversity will be achieved only by recognizing and responding to the critical role of fire. In the Anthropocene, this requires that conservation planning explicitly includes the combined effects of human activities and fire regimes. Improved forecasts for biodiversity must also integrate the connections among people, fire, and ecosystems. Such integration provides an opportunity for new actions that could revolutionize how society sustains biodiversity in a time of changing fire activity. ; The workshop leading to this paper was funded by the Centre Tecnològic Forestal de Catalunya and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions. L.T.K. was supported by a Victorian Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (Victorian Government), a Centenary Fellowship (University of Melbourne), and an Australian Research Council Linkage Project Grant (LP150100765). A.R. was supported by the Xunta de Galicia (Postdoctoral Fellowship ED481B2016/084-0) and the Foundation for Science and Technology under the FirESmart project (PCIF/MOG/0083/2017). A.L.S. was supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (746191) under the European Union Horizon 2020 Programme for Research and Innovation. L.R. was supported by the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Program through the Threatened Species Recovery Hub. L.B. was partially supported by the Spanish Government through the INMODES (CGL2014-59742-C2-2-R) and the ERANET-SUMFORESTS project FutureBioEcon (PCIN-2017-052). This research was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station.