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Reconstructing forest-cover change in the Swiss Alps between 1880 and 2010 using ensemble modelling

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Abstract

Understanding drivers of forest-cover change is essential for a broad range of ecosystem properties. In this work, we assessed changes in forest cover using physical, climatic and socio-economic drivers, including forest neighbourhood effects representing spatial interactions within and between two time periods (1880–1940; 1940–2010), for a mountainous study area located in eastern Switzerland. The robust assessment relied on an ensemble modelling approach that combined projections of six statistical models (GAM, CART, ANN, RF, GBM, GLM). A generic neighbourhood variable (distance to forest edge) explained most of the forest-cover change (variable importance of >90%) for both forest gain and loss, whereas socio-economic, physical and climatic variables were of least importance. The performance of models of forest loss was consistently higher and less varied (TSS of model ensembles 0.65–0.82) compared to models of forest gain (TSS of model ensembles 0.2–0.62) independent of the time period considered. We concluded that (a) the relative importance of drivers for the simulated processes is independent of the time period considered; (b) ensemble modelling proves a powerful tool to assess projection robustness by considering a suite of models rather than a single model type and (c) the inclusion of generic neighbourhood variables such as distance to forest edge improves model performance significantly.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Niklaus E. Zimmermann, the Editors of REEC and two reviewers for valuable input on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Many thanks go also to Bronwyn Price who carefully improved our English. Samuel Berger and Marc Herrmann carefully collated the socio-economic data. This research financed by the FORECOM project (forest-cover changes in mountainous regions—drivers, trajectories, implications, PSRP008/2010), supported by Grant from Switzerland through the Swiss contribution to the enlarged European Union.

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    1. WSL Swiss Federal Research Institute, Zürcherstrasse 111, 8903, Birmensdorf, Switzerland

      Janine Bolliger, Dirk Schmatz, Robert Pazúr & Achilleas Psomas

    2. Department of Geography and Spatial Management, Jagiellonian University, Gronostajowa 7, 30-387, Kraków, Poland

      Katarzyna Ostapowicz

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    1. Janine Bolliger
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    Correspondence to Janine Bolliger.

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    Janine Bolliger and Achilleas Psomas have contributed equally to this paper.

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    Bolliger, J., Schmatz, D., Pazúr, R. et al. Reconstructing forest-cover change in the Swiss Alps between 1880 and 2010 using ensemble modelling. Reg Environ Change 17, 2265–2277 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-016-1090-4

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