Bont Leo Gallus, Hölscher Michael, Mutterer Simon, Beranek Maria, Schweier Janine, Buscher Udo, Scheffler Martin, Husmann Kai, Ottens Leona, Blattert Clemens
Forest Resources and Management, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, Birmensdorf, Switzerland.
Chair of Business Administration, esp. Industrial Management, Faculty of Business and Economics, TUD Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2025 Aug 13;15(1):29761. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-12001-x.
Climate change is challenging the sustainable provision of biodiversity and ecosystem services in mountain forests, including the important protection service against gravitational natural hazards. Forests offer a relatively cost-efficient measure to protect humans and infrastructure from natural hazards. Forest managers are faced with the question of how to adapt their forest to climate change and optimally manage their forests to guarantee future forest multifunctionality. Usually, alternative close-to-nature forest management strategies can be implemented, but individual management objectives and forest resilience affect the optimal portfolio of management strategies. To address this planning task, we used the climate-sensitive forest growth model ForClim and developed a tailored multi-objective optimization method, considering particularities of forests with a protection service. We applied the method in an Alpine forest enterprise in Switzerland. We combined three climate change scenarios with three optimization scenarios. Our results show that a diversified and optimized portfolio of management strategies can safeguard and improve the provision of multiple ecosystem services and biodiversity concurrently. However, given the increasing intensity of climate change, a greater share of climate-adapted close-to-nature forest management strategies is necessary, reaching 78% in forests without a protection service and 68% in forests with a protection service under severe climate change and optimized for multifunctionality. Adaptation also enabled further improvement of biodiversity and ecosystem service provision, particularly for carbon sequestration. The presented simulation and optimization framework, tailored for mountain forests with a protection service, shows flexibility in the integration of management objectives, making it useful for decision support. Forest management planning should rely more on and make use of such frameworks to help support forests under the uncertainties of climate change and to achieve the future political ambitions of multifunctionality and climate resilient forest ecosystems.
气候变化正对山区森林生物多样性和生态系统服务的可持续供给构成挑战，其中包括抵御重力自然灾害这一重要的保护服务。森林提供了一种相对经济高效的措施，可保护人类和基础设施免受自然灾害影响。森林管理者面临着如何使森林适应气候变化以及如何优化森林管理以确保未来森林具备多种功能的问题。通常，可以实施多种近自然森林管理替代策略，但个体管理目标和森林恢复力会影响管理策略的最优组合。为解决这一规划任务，我们使用了对气候敏感的森林生长模型ForClim，并开发了一种量身定制的多目标优化方法，同时考虑了具有保护服务功能森林的特殊性。我们在瑞士的一家高山森林企业中应用了该方法。我们将三种气候变化情景与三种优化情景相结合。我们的结果表明，多样化且优化的管理策略组合能够同时保障和提升多种生态系统服务及生物多样性的供给。然而，鉴于气候变化强度不断增加，有必要加大采用适应气候变化的近自然森林管理策略的比例，在无保护服务功能的森林中这一比例达到78%，在具有保护服务功能且针对多功能进行优化的森林中，在严重气候变化情景下这一比例为68%。适应措施还能进一步改善生物多样性和生态系统服务的供给，尤其是在碳固存方面。所提出的针对具有保护服务功能的山区森林量身定制的模拟与优化框架，在整合管理目标方面展现出灵活性，使其对决策支持很有用处。森林管理规划应更多地依赖并利用此类框架，以帮助在气候变化的不确定性下支持森林发展，并实现未来多功能性和气候适应型森林生态系统的政治目标。
