A probabilistic decision- support system for adaptive forest management under climate change (PROFOREST-DSS)

Climate change, extreme events, and disturbances such as bark beetle outbreaks pose significant challenges to forests across Central Europe, threatening their biodiversity and ecosystem services. Adaptive forest management is crucial for navigating through these uncertainties but requires robust decision-support systems that integrate ecological, economic, and social considerations. This proposed project aims to develop a user-friendly, freely available, web-based decision-support system to empower forest practitioners in making informed and sustainable management choices considering future climate projections.

The proposed decision-support system will leverage the dynamic forest model ForClim to simulate forest succession under various climate and management scenarios, providing insights into the long-term impacts of changes in key indicators such as timber volume, biomass, productivity, species diversity, and tree size distribution. A spatially enhanced multi-criteria decision analysis framework, ProMCDA, will then be employed to evaluate and rank management alternatives in the sense of adaptive forest management based on user-defined preferences and multiple criteria, incorporating uncertainties inherent to climate projections and forest succession.

By integrating ForClim simulations with ProMCDA, the decision-support system will offer a transparent and interpretable platform for exploring trade-offs, assessing risks, and selecting optimal management strategies for the sustainable provision of forest ecosystem services. The project will focus on Swiss forests as a representative case study for Central European temperate forests, capitalizing on their diverse forest types and rich data availability. The decision-support system will be designed to be scalable and transferable to other regions with similar forest characteristics, facilitating adaptive forest management across broader landscapes. Through active stakeholder engagement (e.g., foresters, forest managers, natural conservationists, scientists) and knowledge dissemination, the decision-support system will foster collaborative decision-making and promote the adoption of climate-smart forestry practices, contributing to the long-term resilience and sustainability of forest ecosystems, hence ensuring the provision of ecosystem services.