• Context

A century and more after a major reforestation program, large areas in the French Southern Alps have moved to a landscape mosaic of old pine plantations and new, heterogeneous and uneven-aged, mixed stands. These conditions are challenging foresters in silvicultural practices and management choices.

• Aims

The aims of this study are to understand, analyze, model, and simulate the ongoing phenomena, and to propose a decision-making tool.

• Methods

An individual-based forest dynamics model considering recruitment, growth, and mortality (as related to the spatial arrangement of stands and species, to site conditions and competition) and a simulation system including spatial sampling are designed and calibrated to allow simulation of both silviculture treatments at the stand level and management strategies at the forest or landscape level.

• Results

By keeping track of the trees while simulating at the forest level, they offer an alternative to upscaling strategies and a suitable tool for prediction of stand and forest characteristics in situations influenced by strong driving forces such as colonization and forest maturation.

• Conclusion

This approach is a straightforward means for adjusting forest management to trends such as expansion of shade-tolerant species; as spatial and temporal variation in site conditions are accounted for, it is also a promising way towards predicting their warming-induced upward shift.