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Spatial resilience of forested landscapes under climate change and management

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Abstract

Context

Resilience, the ability to recover from disturbance, has risen to the forefront of scientific policy, but is difficult to quantify, particularly in large, forested landscapes subject to disturbances, management, and climate change.

Objectives

Our objective was to determine which spatial drivers will control landscape resilience over the next century, given a range of plausible climate projections across north-central Minnesota.

Methods

Using a simulation modelling approach, we simulated wind disturbance in a 4.3 million ha forested landscape in north-central Minnesota for 100 years under historic climate and five climate change scenarios, combined with four management scenarios: business as usual (BAU), maximizing economic returns (‘EcoGoods’), maximizing carbon storage (‘EcoServices’), and climate change adaption (‘CCAdapt’). To estimate resilience, we examined sites where simulated windstorms removed >70% of the biomass and measured the difference in biomass and species composition after 50 years.

Results

Climate change lowered resilience, though there was wide variation among climate change scenarios. Resilience was explained more by spatial variation in soils than climate. We found that BAU, EcoGoods and EcoServices harvest scenarios were very similar; CCAdapt was the only scenario that demonstrated consistently higher resilience under climate change. Although we expected spatial patterns of resilience to follow ownership patterns, it was contingent upon whether lands were actively managed.

Conclusions

Our results demonstrate that resilience may be lower under climate change and that the effects of climate change could overwhelm current management practices. Only a substantial shift in simulated forest practices was successful in promoting resilience.

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Acknowledgements

Funding was provided by USDA AFRI (2012-68002-19896) and USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station. We acknowledge substantial contributions by the Staff of the Chippewa National Forest, particularly Kelly Barrett, Jim Gries, Audrey Gustafson, Gary Swanson, Sharon Klinkhammer, Barb Knight, Rose Johnson and John Rickers. We thank Brian Miranda for coding the Linear Wind Extension. Drs. Louis Iverson, Matt Hurteau and Matthew Duveneck provided comments that helped us substantively improve the manuscript. We greatly benefited from Matthew Duveneck’s expertise in R and LANDIS-II parameterization. Thanks also for GIS assistance by Sue Lietz and John Richardson.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Environmental Science and Management, Portland State University, PO Box 721, Portland, OR, 97201, USA

    Melissa S. Lucash & Robert M. Scheller

  2. Institute for Applied Ecosystem Studies, Northern Research Station, USDA Forest Service, Rhinelander, WI, 54501, USA

    Eric J. Gustafson & Brian R. Sturtevant

Authors
  1. Melissa S. Lucash
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  2. Robert M. Scheller
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  4. Brian R. Sturtevant
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Melissa S. Lucash.

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Also, all input data associated with this paper have deposited in the LANDIS-II Foundation website: https://github.com/LANDIS-II-Foundation/Project-MN-Climate-Change-2017

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Lucash, M.S., Scheller, R.M., J. Gustafson, E. et al. Spatial resilience of forested landscapes under climate change and management. Landscape Ecol 32, 953–969 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-017-0501-3

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